Current projects
ROBOPROX: Robotics and Advanced Industrial Production
The growing complexity of industrial production, combined with quality and time-to-market requirements, creates new challenges for engineering practices. This project focuses on research and development in robotics and advanced manufacturing. It aims to advance methods in control and optimization for systems, materials, and manufacturing, as well as robotics and computational methods for production. Our team specializes in human-machine collaboration – we investigate methods to enable more intuitive task specification by combining machine learning with multiple modalities (gestures, eye gaze, language) and prior knowledge in, e.g., CAD models and algorithms for improved task planning and scheduling under uncertainty. ROBOPROX is a partnership between Czech Technical University in Prague, Brno University of Technology, The University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, and Technical University of Ostrava. It is funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, 2023-2028. Visit the project website for more information.
CoreSense: A Hybrid Cognitive Architecture for Deep Understanding
This project addresses research problems related to autonomous robots in open environments. Current robots do not fully understand their environments, complex missions, and the unexpected events that affect their performance. The lack of system-level awareness severely limits their performance, dependability, and trustworthiness. CoreSense aims to develop a profound core architecture, scientific theory, and technology for deep understanding and awareness of autonomous systems and cognitive robots to improve their performance, flexibility, reliability, and user experience. Our team contributes a generic methodology for physics-aware, data-driven modeling to generate concise, physically plausible, and explainable dynamic models of robots or their environments. We also support knowledge representation and reasoning by leveraging foundational ontologies such as SUMO and using state-of-the-art automated theorem provers to complement the models with formalization, automated reasoning, and query-answering capabilities. Finally, we contribute a dedicated risk awareness module to predict safety and reliability risks associated with cognitive robot operations in open environments. CoreSense is funded by the Horizon Europe, 2022 – 2026. Visit the project website for more information.
FlexCRAFT: Cognitive Robots for Flexible Agro Food Technology
The aim of the FlexCRAFT program is to develop new robotics solutions for agriculture and food processing. In these application domains robots must be able to handle a substantial variation in shape, size and hardness of products, which is still a major challenge for the current robotics technology. We focus on developing generic robot skills for operations like automated harvesting of tomatoes, processing and packaging of meat and the packaging of bags of crisps and boxes of biscuits.The consortium includes the following universities and companies: Wageningen Universiteit & Research, Eindhoven University of Technology, Delft University of Technology, University of Twente, University of Amsterdam, ABB, AgriFoodTech Platform, Aris BV, BluePrint Automation, Cellar Land, Cerescon, Demcon, Festo, GMV, Houdijk Holland, Marel Stork Poultry Processing, Maxon Motor, Priva, Protonic Holland, Rijk Zwaan, and 3DUniversum. FlexCRAFT is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), 2019 – 2025. Visit the project website for more information.