Advanced AI and RobotIcS for autonomous task pErformance

Maintaining the competitiveness and leadership position of crucial industries such as renewable energy and agriculture, is contingent upon AI and Robotics increasingly becoming a widespread and integral part of the relevant technological landscapes, particularly in the face of steep labour shortages. ARISE project aims to introduce a combination of perception and control modules around a reconfigurable robotic manipulator that will enable a step change in the level of automation of complex manipulation tasks. ARISE will comprise the following key novel technology components that will significantly push the state of the art in terms of automatic task segmentation, human robot interaction and complex manipulation: (1) Two reconfigurable pneumatic-based robotic manipulators mounted on a mobile robotic platform (2) Novel soft end-effectors with variable stiffness that will allow for a diverse set of manipulation tasks (3) A Robotic perception module comprising 3D vision algorithms (4) A Localisation and Mapping module that will allow the robot to accurately identify its position within the environment (5) A Semantic Mapping module powered by scene understanding algorithms (6) A Knowledge Representation framework that will capture important information regarding objects’ properties and relationships (7) A Hierarchical Imitation Learning framework for acquiring robotic skills to accomplish complex tasks directly from human demonstrators (8) A Human-Interaction conditioned Path and Task planning module enabling reactive robot control (9) An edge-AI framework for deploying Machine Learning models and computer vision algorithms at the edge in a streamlined fashion. The ARISE toolchain will be integrated and validated in 5 real use case scenarios including installation and repair, and transplanting and harvesting tasks, in solar and hydroponic farms, respectively.