CITIC leads an international consortium for the creation of a new generation of autonomous robots with applications in sectors such as agri-food, education, industrial production and retail.

The main objective of the PILLAR-Robots project (Purposeful Intrinsically Motivated Lifelong Learning Autonomous Robots), an international consortium led by CITIC the University of A Coruña’s Centre for Information and Communications Technology Research and part of the CIGUS Network, set up within the scope of the Horizon Europe programme, is to create more autonomous robots with the capacity to solve real situations in the agri-food sector, educational entertainment, non-structured industrial production and retail. The total budget assigned to the project stands at just under five million euros, with over a million corresponding to CITIC.

Artificial intelligence for the design of more human robots

PILLAR-Robots seeks to develop a new generation of robots with a greater degree of autonomy. The consortium’s Principal Investigator, Richard Duro, explained that “These robots will be capable of setting their own goals and strategies, creatively harnessing their life experience to meeting the wishes of their designers the desires of their designers (human users in real life applications). To this end, the project will apply the concept of purpose, taken from cognitive science, to increase the autonomy and independence of robots in learning”.

These objectives will guide the acquisition of effective knowledge and skills with real relevance for real situations. The project will develop algorithms for setting objectives, with the aim of biasing the perceptual, motivational and decisional systems of the cognitive architecture developed for robots towards those purposes. It also seeks to establish strategies for the autonomous learning of representations, skills and models that will facilitate decisions that may lead to achieving the objectives set. This includes decisions about what to learn and in what sequence.

The CITIC researcher went on to explain that, “In this sense, PILLAR-Robots will apply and validate demonstrators of the so-called “open learning” (in situations that were not contemplated during the robot design process), using the intrinsically motivated cognitive architecture that will be developed as part of the project and all additional strategies related to the objective. They will be implemented in three different areas, characterised by different type and degrees of variability and uncertainty: the agri-food sector, educational entertainment and non-structural industrial production and retail”.

Cutting-edge research in Europe

In order to carry out this project, a consortium was set up by the Integrated Engineering Group (GII in its Spanish initials), led by Richard Duro, as part of a team from the UDC’s CITIC team. It includes highly acclaimed teams from the Italian National Research Council (CNR), the Sorbonne University of Paris, the Athena Research Centre, AI2Life SRL, an Italian company specialised in Artificial Intelligence applications, and PAL Robotics, one of Europe’s leading service robot manufacturers, based in Spain. This cutting-edge work is an example of the quality and impact of research accredited by the Galician autonomous government (Xunta de Galicia) through the CIGUS Network.