Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EMERGE (Emergent awareness from minimal collectives)
Période du rapport: 2022-10-01 au 2023-09-30
The EMERGE project will deliver a new philosophical, mathematical, and technological framework to demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, how collaborative awareness – a representation of shared existence, environment and goals – can arise from the perceptions and interactions of individual agents, without leveraging a pre-existing common language between them. This collaborative awareness envisioned by EMERGE will transform robotic systems, as well as all kinds of applications which involve providing a service over a loosely coupled collective of entities, both physical or virtual, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, smart services, biomedical nanodevices, and many others.
In terms of innovation impact, EMERGE aims to surpass limitations and barriers of the current state-of-the-art multi-agent collaborative systems, with potential to produce breakthroughs and open new markets in the next generation of robotic systems. For that, the project focuses on three use cases. The first use case is modular soft robots – self‐assembling, repairing or replicating robots made from soft materials which offer high freedom of movement, even in confined spaces, and better manipulation of delicate objects. In these robots, the body formed by a physically distributed collective needs to self-organise to account for the dynamic addition of components. The second use-case are robotic swarms – groups with a large number of robots whose behaviour arises from the interactions between themselves and with their environment. This is an example of a large-scale minimal collective where agents need coordination to achieve a collaborative goal. Finally, the third use case are collaborative robots, or cobots – robots interacting in direct contact with, or in close proximity to, humans. These represent a closer-to-market use case where interoperability is currently a significant barrier. While robotics provides the perfect testing ground for this new framework, EMERGE also envisions impact in areas such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart cities and transportation, microservice-based information and communications technology (ICT) systems, and biomedical nanodevices, among others.