Description

The coordination action CA-RoboCom will design and describe the FET Flagship initiative “Robot Companions for Citizens” (RCC) including its: Scientific and Technological framework, governance, financial and legal structure, funding scheme, competitiveness strategy and risk analysis.

The FET Flagship initiative RCC will realize a unique and unforeseen multidisciplinary science and engineering program supporting a radically new approach towards machines and how we deploy them in our society.

Robot Companions for Citizens is an ecology of sentient machines that will help and assist humans in the broadest possible sense to support and sustain our welfare. RCC will have soft bodies based on the novel integration of solid articulated structures with flexible properties and display soft behavior based on new levels of perceptual, cognitive and emotive capabilities. RCC will be cognizant and aware of their physical and social world and respond accordingly. RCC will attain these properties because of their grounding in the most advanced sentient machines we know: animals.

Robot Companions for Citizens will validate our understanding of the general design principles underlying biological bodies and brains, establishing a positive feedback between science and engineering.

Driven by the vision and ambition of RCC, CA-RoboCom will, by means of an appropriate outreach strategy, involve all pertinent stakeholders: science and technology, society, finance, politics and industry. Other than the commitment of its Consortium, CA-RoboCom will involve a wide range of external experts in its working groups, its Advisory Board, and in its European and International Cooperation board. The CA-RoboCom consortium believes that given the potential transformative and disruptive effects of RCC in our society their development and deployment has to be based on a the broadest possible support platform.