Industrial leadership in AI, Data and Robotics boosting competitiveness and the green transition (AI Data and Robotics Partnership) (IA)[[https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/662906/IPOL_STU(2021)662906_EN.pdf]] -

Expected Outcome

Projects are expected to contribute to one of the two following outcomes, exclusively:

• The creation of systems to address large scale challenges using combined robotics data and AI solutions that have significant impact on the objectives of the green deal. For example; in improving domestic energy consumption or in the cleaning up of contaminated land and waterways or in accelerating the circular economy along the complete value chain through automated waste avoidance and waste processing or reuse of materials.
• The creation of systems to address large scale resource optimisation challenges using combined AI and Data solutions, that have significant impact on the objectives of the green deal, such as optimisation of any kind of resources, from production to use along the complete value chain in order to minimise waste or foster the reuse of resources or in using AI and data solutions to maximize energy efficiency, ensuring energy security.

Which will contribute to

• The validation of solutions at scale by demonstrating the potential of integrating these technologies to address challenges in industrial ecosystems and develop solutions that are environmental friendly and contribute to the green deal
• Making and exploiting major advances in science and technology, to maintain Europe’s scientific excellence and ensure sovereignty of these key technologies expected to affect the society in contributing to addressing major societal challenges affecting the environment.
• Exploring deployment solutions that can ensure efficient scale up.
• Boosting the uptake of AI, Data and Robotics to exploit the major contribution expected to environmental sustainability.

Proposals should clearly identify the outcome it will focus on.

Scope

Proposals should demonstrate the added value of integrating either AI and Data, or AI, Data and Robotics technologies through large-scale validation scenarios reaching critical mass and mobilising the user industry, while demonstrating high potential impact contributing to the European Green Deal objectives. For example in the recycling of electric car batteries, cleaning and monitoring the oceans, decommissioning energy infrastructure, supporting the recycling of materials, the optimisation of energy usage, the minimisation of resource waste in value-chains, for example through the better adaption of production to demand, etc.

Focus should be given to attracting new user industries, and/or showing new business opportunities to boost the uptake of AI, Data and Robotics in major sectors and stimulate the involvement where appropriate of end-users to define the technological barriers to uptake and the use cases for deployment.

Proposals should address the involvement of SMEs and/or start-ups with significant potential to foster innovation through their engagement with large scale pilots. Focus will be on leveraging and nurturing emerging collaborations between stakeholder communities shaping an effective eco-system fit for the challenge of European AI, Data, Robotics, and on accelerating European R&I through structural involvement of innovative SME and deep-tech start-ups.

Proposals should target sectors and application domains with wide-scale deployment potential and maximum contribution to the green deal.

Multidisciplinary innovation activities should address one of the following:

• Large scale pilots bringing major industries from key application sectors in Europe – facilitating collaboration between small and large companies with the goal of exploiting and integrating existing tools, sub-systems and solutions that are re-usable from other sectors (thereby showing scalability/versatility, and enabling economies of scale) to have significant impact on the objectives of the green deal. The focus will be on the integration of tools, systems sub-systems and solution in the pilot by the grant beneficiaries. In this case, proposals are not expected to involve the use of financial support to third parties.
• The development of large-scale pilots addressing key applications with a significant and scalable impact on the objectives of the green deal by facilitating collaboration between small and large companies able address key challenges in the deployment of AI, Data and Robotics.

Financial Support to Third Parties: Projects should use FSTP to leverage novel technical advantage to address the operation of the pilot and to thereby support end users and service providers in addressing the challenges of the green deal. Third parties are expected to use the pilots for developing, testing and validating innovative solutions with significant impact on the green deal. Proposals should clearly delineate the expected contributions from the main beneficiaries as well as from the third parties, to ensure their coherence and impact. 40% of the EU funding requested by the proposal should be allocated to the purpose of financial support to third parties.

Proposals should either involve directly, or indirectly, appropriate expertise in other relevant disciplines for example related to environmental science and, as necessary, Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) disciplines, especially where this is relevant to validating the effectiveness of proposed systems and technologies with respect to the green deal objectives.

Proposals should include a clear business case and exploitation strategy.

All proposals are expected to embed mechanisms to assess and demonstrate progress (with qualitative and quantitative KPIs, benchmarking and progress monitoring, as well as illustrative application use-cases demonstrating well defined added value to end users), and share communicable results with the European R&D community, through the AI-on-demand platform and/or the Digital Industrial Platform for Robotics, public community resources, to maximise re-use of results, either by developers, or for uptake, and optimise efficiency of funding; enhancing the European AI, Data and Robotics ecosystem through the sharing of results and best practice.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on AI, data and robotics.

Activities are expected to start at TRL 3-5 and achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

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