In recent years, robots are being increasingly deployed outside strictly controlled environments. When faced with unexpected situations, these robots are often incapable of taking appropriate actions and require human intervention. The goal of CONVINCE is to advance the capabilities of robots to perform complex tasks robustly and safely within unstructured environments via autonomous and unsupervised adaptation to the environment and operational context.
More specifically, the key contribution is to develop and verify cognitive deliberation capabilities that ensure safe robot operation over extended periods of time without human intervention.
European partner
Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – capofila (IT), Università degli Studi di Genova (IT), Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (FR), Robert Bosch Gmbh (DE), CLEIA (FR), Inventya Ventures (EU) Limited (INV) – IE TIME.LEX (BE), University of Birmingham (UK), Comune di Torino (IT), Fondazione Torino Musei (IT).
The project in Torino
The City of Torino together with Fondazione Torino Musei will be the end user of one of the case studies carried out by the project: following the first tests realized thanks to the H2020 project 5G-TOURS, a humanoid robot (R1) will be deployed inside a museum and will physically guide visitors to the exhibits, moving and describing the artworks. This guided tour will be performed autonomously by the robot, which will interact with the context (crowd, level of attention of the visitors, disturbances, etc.) and navigate in the environment following a path computed dynamically and based on the expected duration of the tour.
The pratical steps
The earliest examples of robotic museum guides had very simple interaction capabilities, and their behaviours were manually designed to activate pre-programmed contingency behaviours when required (e.g., recharge the battery or notify operators of failures). In general, they lacked the ability to interact dynamically with humans, detect unexpected conditions and adapt their behaviour dynamically to fulfil the task. Aiming at exploring and overcome such limits, within the framework of the CONVINCE project, in Torino, a robotic museum guide will be deployed in a real context, in one of the museums managed by Fondazione Torino Musei, to perform real, IA-controlled tours in complete autonomy.
Numbers
This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 101070227
EU contribution to the city of Torino
Partner
Project duration in months
