Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Mobile Refrigeration System Refrigerant Leakage Monitoring (LEAKDETECT)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: United Kingdom,United Kingdom,Ireland,United Kingdom,Bulgaria,Italy,Netherlands
Call:  (FP7-SME-2008-1, 2008)
Start date: 2009-09-01
End date: 2011-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1293208.0
EU funding (EUR): 970872.0
Participants: 8
Project status: CLOSED

The European SME haulage industry is under unprecedented pressure due to fuel price increases and environmental pollution. If crude oil prices average $80 a barrel in 2008 as predicted, prices will have risen 154% since 2003. In real terms, fuel prices have risen 42% in the last 4 years. Fuel constitutes 30% of the operating costs, therefore costs are increasing at nearly twice the rate of inflation. The haulage industry in Europe emits over 922.6 M tons of pollutants every year which is not sustainable. The industry faces increased taxation and legislation, impacting on profitability. The average profit margin for a haulage firm is between 0% and 2%, down from over 3.5% in 2003. The problems above are worse for the refrigerated transport industry because refrigerated vehicles consume extra fuel to run the refrigeration plant. The industry is in desperate need of any technologies that can help reduce operating costs and restore profitability. This is important because 72.5% of freight in Europe is moved by road. Low-resistance tyres and aerodynamic packages are helping but technologies specifically directed at refrigerated vehicles are required. This project is motivated by the fact that even correctly operating refrigeration systems leak refrigerant which causes a reduction in coefficient of performance. This in turn raises the compressor duty cycle and further increases fuel consumption. Refrigerants are hydroflorourocarbons which have a high global warming potential and so contribute further pollutants. We will develop a refrigerant leakage monitoring system based on a network of low-cost surface acoustic wave sensors. This will enable the refrigerant charge of a system to be maintained at the optimum level so that it operates at the design maximum COP. The benefit of this system will be a decrease in operating costs equivalent to approximately a 5% reduction in fuel consumption equating to a saving of €2250 per annum for a refrigerated trailer.

Keywords: sensors,acoustic wave,sensing polymers
Complex Socio-Technical System in Ambient Intelligence (SOCIONICAL)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Future and emerging technologies
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Germany,Germany,Israel,Austria,United Kingdom,Switzerland,Netherlands,Poland,Germany,Germany,Germany,Spain,Italy,Malta
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2007-3, 2007)
Start date: 2009-02-01
End date: 2013-01-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 7169741.0
EU funding (EUR): 5299998.0
Participants: 17
Project status: CLOSED

We will develop Complexity Science based modelling, prediction and simulation methods for large scale socio-technical systems. We focus on the specific example of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) based smart environments. A key component of such environments is the ability to monitor user actions and to adjust its configuration and functionality accordingly. Thus, the system reacts to human behaviour while at the same influencing it. This creates a feedback loop and leads to a tight entanglement between the human and the technical system. At the same time there is dynamic, heterogeneous human-human, human-technology, and technology-technology communication leading to ad-hoc coupling between components and different feedback loops. The project will study global properties and emergent phenomena that arise in AmI based socio-technical systems from such local feedback loops and their coupling on two concrete scenarios: transportation and emergency/disaster. SOCIONICAL takes a parallel, multi facetted research approach. Thus, we will investigate analytical methods, complex networks based representations, and agent based models. The advances in modelling and prediction will be verified by large scale, distributed simulation driven by real life data. We will develop a methodology by which a small number of instrumented users can be realistically integrated in a large scale simulation as additional &apos;agents&apos;, experiencing the system and driving it. A separate WP is devoted to the integration of different approaches into a coherent framework. Another ensures generalization. To take into account all technological, psychological and social dimensions and realistic diversity of behaviours we have assembled a multi disciplinary consortium with separate WPs for technology analysis and the modelling of human technology interactions. SOCIONICAL has a WP devoted to the development and dissemination of guidelines and recommendation for businesses and policy makers.

Keywords: complex systems,ambient intelligence
EVolving morphologies for human-Robot sYmbiotic interactiON (EVRYON)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Future and emerging technologies
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Italy,Netherlands,Netherlands,Switzerland,Hungary,Slovenia
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2007-3, 2007)
Start date: 2009-02-01
End date: 2012-05-31
Duration (months): 40.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3668497.0
EU funding (EUR): 2727180.0
Participants: 7
Project status: CLOSED

The goal of the EVRYON project is to develop a novel approach for the design of Wearable Robots (WRs) that can be used for such applications as rehabilitation, assistance, human augmentation and more. Such systems should aim at the optimal trade-off between performance, i.e. the level of assistance to be provided to the user, and some critical requirements, such as minimal weight and encumbrance, low energy consumption and several other factors that can impact the effectiveness of WRs. Under this regard, better WRs can be developed if ‘embodied intelligence’, and particularly ‘structural intelligence’, are properly exploited. To this aim, EVRYON will develop an open-ended design process where both robot morphology and control are co-evolved and optimized in a simulation environment, where also the dynamical properties of the human body are taken into account. The EVRYON design methodology will originate advanced tools for assisted mechatronic design, that will be validated by developing an active orthosis for the lower limbs. The orthosis will include a novel hip module for improved ergonomics and a distributed sensory apparatus that will also monitor the motions of the upper body for an improved user intention detection. The EVRYON WR will integrate kinematic, dynamic and control solutions produced by the co-evolutionary optimization process. Custom variable impedance modules will allow the tuning of the dynamical properties of the robot so that walking will arise as an emerging dynamic behaviour. The WR prototype will be tested on a group of elderly subjects with age-related motor decay so to assess its acceptability and its ability to restore proper walking and increase personal autonomy.

Keywords: structural intelligence,human-robot interaction,morphology optimization,wearable robotics,rehabilitation robotics,symbiotic dynamics,morphology and control co-evolution.
A wearable miniaturized fall detection system for the elderly (FALLWATCH)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: France,France,France,Spain,France,United Kingdom,France,France,Italy,United Kingdom,Italy
Call:  (FP7-SME-2008-1, 2008)
Start date: 2009-02-01
End date: 2011-07-31
Duration (months): 30.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1459126.0
EU funding (EUR): 1128931.0
Participants: 11
Project status: CLOSED

Falls among the elderly occur frequently. Approximately 30% of people over 65 fall accidentally each year, and for those over 80 this rate raises up to 50%. Falls are an important factor in the health limitations of the elderly due to a high morbidity caused by physical and psychological consequences, loss of independence and even death. Late or non existing responses cause 2 million persons having to be hospitalized and approximately 85000 deaths can be attributed each year to this fact. There are a number of alarm devices trying to satisfy the need of an early intervention in case of fall, but existing fall detectors do not have a remarkable social impact neither a significant market penetration: just 4.5% of Europe&apos;s potential end users have any of the existing social alarms. Two facts hinder their effectiveness of the existing fall detectors, capping therefore the market demand: bad ergonomics and lack of reliability. FallWatch project proposes a new generation fall detector device included in a whole fall detection system and is thought as an effective way of minimizing the consequences of falls in the elderly. FallWatch will automatically detect a fall and immediately contact the health services to allow an early intervention. FallWatch will produce, on the one hand, a miniaturized fall detector device of a scale reduction by 50% of existing devices, and on the other hand, biocompatible materials for the device’s package and for an adhesive patch to comfortably stick the device to the user’s skin. FallWatch system will solve the reliability problem by using both wearable device and environmental infra red sensors at the user’s home and developing a specific data fusion algorithm that will cross check the variables to avoid false alarms. In order to achieve the ergonomics and reliability goals, FallWatch project will work in different technological areas which are widely explained along this proposal.

Keywords: elderly,falls
Artificial Fish Locomotion and Sensing (FILOSE)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Estonia,Italy,Italy,United Kingdom,Latvia
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2007-3, 2007)
Start date: 2009-02-01
End date: 2012-05-31
Duration (months): 40.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2473534.0
EU funding (EUR): 1829000.0
Participants: 5
Project status: CLOSED

The overall aim of FILOSE is acquiring a deeper understanding of the principles underlying fish locomotion and sensing, in order to develop new technologies for underwater vehicles on the basis of biological evidence. More specifically, FILOSE focuses on shedding light on how fish exploit lateral line sensing in underwater environments. The lateral line provides fish with the ability to detect hydrodynamic patterns in the surrounding environment, thereby playing a key role in adapting to environmental changes. FILOSEs main goals are captured by the following objectives: 1. investigate fish locomotion in a controlled hydrodynamic environment, in particular addressing the issue of how fish react to changes in hydrodynamic patterns; 2. develop a novel mechanical design of an underwater fish robot, characterized by high maneuverability and low complexity; 3. develop a MEMS-based artificial lateral line; 4. develop a control method for the artificial fish, aimed at reproducing locomotion patterns found in biological fish and based on a central pattern generator (CPG); 5. develop a method to characterize and classify hydrodynamic images, making use of a mechanosensory array; 6. develop a classification method to couple detected hydrodynamic events with locomotion patterns found in biological fish; 7. conduct comparative experiments in a controlled hydrodynamic environment to assess behaviour of an artificial fish equipped with artificial lateral line sensing with respect to the behaviour of a biological fish. We believe that the proposed investigations are key to building underwater robots that improve on the existing by exhibiting a greater degree of autonomy, adaptability to environmental changes, maneuverability, stability and overall lower complexity, as well as moving more efficiently and quietly.

Keywords: underwater robots,bio-inspired robotics,fish biology
DL.org: Coordination Action on Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices, and Modelling Foundations (DL.ORG)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Digital libraries and content
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Countries involved: Italy,Greece,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2007-3, 2007)
Start date: 2008-12-01
End date: 2010-11-30
Duration (months): 27.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1681077.0
EU funding (EUR): 1200000.0
Participants: 4
Project status: CLOSED

The goal of the DL.org, Coordination Action on Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices, and Modelling Foundations, is to create a framework where key representatives from major initiatives and on-going Digital Library related projects may collaborate, discuss experiences, exchange expertise, work on interoperability of their solutions, promote shared standards, and provide the DL community with a deeper understanding of key issues and new directions. The ultimate objective will rapidly advance research and development techniques thus facilitating the creation of a European Information Space. In using the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model as its conceptual and operational basis, the project will be making an innovative attempt to achieve the above and concrete, far-reaching results that will be much broader and have a much more significant impact that any other similar effort in the past. DL.org will be active at a crucial time by executing coordination actions that target the essence of integration amongst a series of many DL efforts that are currently on-going, each one acting in isolation and adopting ad-hoc solutions and methodologies. The main instrument of the project to promote interoperability among all relevant efforts consists of six thematic Working Groups composed by DL.org partners and representatives from prominent DL projects and organisations. Key expected outcomes of DL.org include (i) a “Digital Library Technology and Methodology Cookbook” providing a portfolio of current best practices and patterns to facilitate cross-fertilization between existing systems and their enhancement in terms of critical interoperability issues; (ii) a consolidated and enhanced version of the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model; (iii) workshops, summer schools, eCourses and dissemination activities to communicate the impact of DL.org achievements to relevant communities.

Keywords: interoperability,digital library reference model,digital library technology and methodology patterns,european information space
Novel Design Principles and Technologies for a New Generation of High Dexterity Soft-bodied Robots Inspired by the Morphology and Behaviour of the Octopus (OCTOPUS)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Future and emerging technologies
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Italy,Israel,Switzerland,Italy,United Kingdom,Greece,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2007-3, 2007)
Start date: 2009-02-01
End date: 2013-07-31
Duration (months): 54.0
Total project cost (EUR): 9762763.0
EU funding (EUR): 7600000.0
Participants: 8
Project status: CLOSED

The octopus is a marine invertebrate with amazing motor capabilities and intelligent behaviour. Its body has no rigid structures and has interesting characteristics, from an engineering viewpoint: infinite number of degrees of freedom (dof), bending in many different directions, variable and controllable stiffness, high dexterity, fine manipulation, highly distributed control. The octopus represents a biological demonstration of how effective behaviour in the real world is tightly related to the morphology of the body. The grand challenge of the OCTOPUS IP is investigating and understanding the principles that give rise to the octopus sensory-motor capabilities and at incorporating them in new design approaches and ICT and robotics technologies to build an embodied artefact, based broadly on the anatomy of the 8-arm body of an octopus, and with similar performance in water, in terms of dexterity, speed, control, flexibility, and applicability. The new technologies expected to result from the IP concern actuation (soft actuators), sensing (distributed flexible tactile sensors), control and robot architectures (distributed control, coordination of many dof), materials (variable stiffness), mechanisms (soft-bodied hydrostat structures), kinematics models. The final robotic octopus prototype will be capable of locomotion on different substrates, of squeezing into small apertures, of dextrous manipulation by coordinating the eight arms, of anchoring in order to exert forces on external environment; of controlling a flexible structure with virtually infinite dof. This IP is expected to achieve new science and new technology, demonstrated by joint publications and patents, through a truly interdisciplinary research work programme, by a consortium of engineering and biology groups, each involving diverse disciplines and all experienced in biomimetics, possessing, as a consortium, the best expertise available in Europe for pursuing the objectives of the IP.

Keywords: biomimetics,soft-bodied robots,muscular hydrostats,continuum robots
Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Models (HATS)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Future and emerging technologies
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Sweden,Norway,Sweden,Spain,Germany,Italy,Netherlands,Germany,Belgium,Germany,Estonia
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2007-3, 2007)
Start date: 2009-03-01
End date: 2013-02-28
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 7301979.0
EU funding (EUR): 5636280.0
Participants: 13
Project status: CLOSED

Software systems are central for the infrastructure of modern society. To justify the huge investments such systems need to live for decades. This requires software which is highly adaptable. Software systems must support a high degree of (spatial) variability to accomodate a range of requirements and operating conditions, and temporal evolvability to allow these parameters to change over time. Current approaches to reusability and maintenance are inadequate to cope with the dynamics and longevity of future software applications and infrastructures, e.g. for e-commerce, e-health and e-government. At the same time, we rely increasingly on systems that provide a high degree of trustworthiness. Thus, the major challenge facing software construction in the next decades is high adaptability combined with trustworthiness. A severe limitation of current development practices is the missing rigour of models and property specifications. Without a formal notation of distributed, component-based systems it is impossible to achieve automation for consistency checking, enforcement of security, generation of trustworthy code, etc. Furthermore, it does not suffice to simply extend current formal approaches. We propose to take an empirically successful, yet informal software development paradigm and put it on a formal basis. Specifically, we will turn software product family (SWPF) development into a rigorous approach. The technical core of the project is an Abstract Behavioural Specification language which will allow precise description of SWPF features and components and their instances. The main project outcome is a methodological and tool framework achieving not merely far-reaching automation in maintaining dynamically evolving software, but an unprecedented level of trust while informal processes are replaced with rigorous analyses based on formal semantics. This includes the perspective of designing self-adapting software systems.

Keywords: adaptable software,evolvable software,formal model,formal specification,software product family,trustworthiness,security
Developmental pathway towards autonomy and dexterity in robot in-hand manipulation (HANDLE)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: France,United Kingdom,Spain,Portugal,Sweden,Germany
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2007-3, 2007)
Start date: 2009-02-02
End date: 2013-01-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 8189858.0
EU funding (EUR): 6350000.0
Participants: 10
Project status: CLOSED

The field of robotics is undergoing a major revolution as it is increasingly being applied to general purposes outside the production line: for health, rehabilitation and professional services, in domestic and leisure environments, as well as hazardous environments. There, one keystone for robots to carry out accurate and intelligent tasks, with and for people, is their ability both to handle autonomously all sorts of objects and to use human tools. However, today’s robots are unable to achieve dexterous and fine manipulation, especially when this requires in-hand manipulation. They are far from being able to understand and reason about their environments, their goals and their own capabilities, to learn skills and improve their performance by what they have been taught and their own experience, to interact with their environments with the efficiency of humans. The HANDLE project aims at understanding how humans perform the manipulation of objects in order to replicate grasping and skilled in-hand movements with an anthropomorphic artificial hand, and thereby move robot grippers from current best practice towards more autonomous, natural and effective articulated hands. The project implies not only focusing on technological developments but also working with fundamental multidisciplinary research aspects in order to endow the robotic hand system with advanced perception capabilities, high level feedback control and elements of intelligence that allow recognition of objects and context, reasoning about actions and a high degree of recovery from failure during the execution of dexterous tasks. Integrating findings from disciplines such as neuroscience, developmental psychology, cognitive science, robotics, multimodal perception and machine learning, the method we will develop is based on an original blend of learning and predicting behaviours from imitation and “babbling” to allow the robot to be capable of responding to gaps in its knowledge.

Keywords: robotics,artificial intelligence,computer technology,cognitive system,real time autonomous robotic manipulation,dexterous hand,motor babbling