The AI-PRISM team, comprising a solid interdisciplinary team of 25 organizations, including an affiliated entity (EVR Italia) and the international cooperation of South Korea, celebrates its first anniversary in September 2023. Throughout the last 12 months, significant progress has been made in our use cases, human-centred AI-based innovations and project communication.
The journey started at the kick-off meeting in Valencia, Spain. This meeting aimed to get to know the consortium partners and establish a plan to start working and collaborating on the most imminent tasks. As a result, remarkable advancements have been made in developing our ecosystem of collaboration and cooperation between Humans and Robots in manufacturing work environments where tasks are challenging to automate, and speed-versatility are essential.
Progressing in the technical developments
A worth mentioning milestone is on our use case scenarios. We have identified AI-PRISM’s vision and requirements, analysed use cases, and worked on benchmarking technology. Now, we are focusing on validating and integrating our solutions into real industrial scenarios while developing training tools and monitoring performance.
In our human-centred AI-based developments, we have developed perception, reasoning, acting, control, and learning from human demonstration innovations, conducting user requirement analysis and benchmarking studies that inform our AI-based solutions. At this point, we are creating a collaborative human safety management system and continue to validate and integrate our innovations.
Regarding the open access of our ecosystem, we have started to work on the Alliance of Open-Access Pilot Suite, led by Tampere University. This includes an end-user simulation platform for remote access to facilities, equipment, and manipulators within the alliance.
Creating knowledge is essential to exploiting the results approach for a technical project such as AI-PRISM. Therefore, in this first year, we have conducted and published our first study on optimising LPWAN networks for dynamic scenarios. These findings are relevant to industrial wireless sensor networks and demonstrate how traffic density affects KPIs.
Moreover, we have published a scientific paper presenting PatchMixer for 3D point cloud processing. The publication is key to developing our Ambient digitalization for Human-Robot Collaboration work on processing AI-based perception modules and Agent Level Reasoning, Acting and Control modules that aim to take the sensor inputs coming from raw and derivative data.
“AI-PRISM has already established a clear reference architecture and specifications, and mapped all pilot use cases requirements and architectural components. In such a large-scale project, reaching this level of common understanding is quite an achievement and something to be proud of (big congrats to all contributing partners!). We could not have reached this milestone without experimentation, partial demonstrators, and early prototype implementations. In the next phase of the project, we will use these partial developments as building blocks to build up larger integrated demonstrators, taking an incremental approach. We will keep feedback loops with use case owners active, to adapt to the dynamics of the use case scenarios. From now on, the specifications will be updated and available online so that they are always up to date and available to technical partners.”
Raising awareness, sharing our project and learning from others
As technology is advancing very fast, discussing several topics concerning Artificial Intelligence is crucial. In this first year, the AI-PRISM team has launched different campaigns on digital skills and education, the European Year of Skills, Women in Science and Technology, and the necessity to include a social approach, SME’s digital transition, ethics and transparency. Thanks to our efforts, we have successfully built a social media community of over 1,200 followers.
In addition to joining European initiatives, AI-PRISM has gone beyond the European Union borders and landed in Korea to meet Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and A&G Technology Co. These entities are supporting our use case in the home appliances manufacturing industry. In this sense, we have shared the importance of EU-Korean partnerships in science and innovation and published our #1 press release in Korean.
Furthermore, AI-PRISM has been showcased in 7 events, summits, and conferences in the European Union and beyond its borders. Our partners have spread the word on our innovations from Spain to Denmark, Romania and Canada. Through these gatherings, we have connected with the robotics ecosystem in the European Union and formed synergies with more than 15 European projects
At the European Robotics Forum in Denmark (ERF2023) we coordinated the workshop “Human-Robot Collaboration & AI in Challenging Industrial Applications.” In addition to presenting AI-PRISM, the team engaged in discussions with the other 6 European projects – ZerOp, Merging, Ferox, Respect, Felice and Agile Hand. The international forum was the ideal opportunity to connect with the sister project Converging EU, participating in the “10th Hybrid Production Systems Cluster” workshop and supporting partner Profactor in their “Robotics and AI for sustainable recycling and remanufacturing” workshop, inaugurating the forum.
One of the highlights of this first year was the coordination and participation of AI-PRISM in the Digital Manufacturing Summit in Valencia. The international summit gathered 300 industry users, technology partners, academics, researchers and policymakers. At the summit, AI-PRISM conducted its workshop “Robots in Manufacturing”, featuring the project, and participated in the “Manufacturing Reconfiguration and Flexibility” workshop with projects Penelope, DIMOFAC, AIDEAS and SINTEF.
AI-PRISM had other noteworthy participations in various events such as HaDEA/MCID Digital symposium in Romania, the CKC2023 in Canada, the IQ Digital Summit in Cluj-Napoca and the IEEE CVPR 2023 in Canada. In the last one, we had the opportunity to present the paper “Novel Class Discovery for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation” as a poster. The paper focuses on a topic previously not explored/researched, particularly compared to its 2D counterparts.
"AI-PRISM has reached its first year. Happy anniversary!!!🙂 Apart from the technicalities, during these 12 months we have worked towards two main objectives. On the one hand, we needed to work on a project vision agreed by all partners, and on the other, we have been dealing with the understanding of the use cases. It is true that this has been hard sometimes due to the large consortium we are (25 partners from 12 different countries), but in the end we managed to find a suitable solution for all, that we will follow in the next months. Therefore, the efforts invested by the Consortium during this period, have provided high evidence of tangible results regarding the implementation approach and I am sure that this direction would allow timely and successful delivery of the expected project results. Thank you all!!!"
The AI-PRISM team is ready for a second year focused on our use case scenarios validation and demonstration, more campaigns, events and creating and sharing knowledge opportunities.
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