An ambitious new Italian-led European research project aimed at teaching robots to recognize their own limits and to self-correct in order to live and work at their best with humans, in homes and factories, has been launched by the Italian Institute of Technology (ITT). The project, dubbed Convince, also involves Genoa university, Turin city council, and the Turin Museum Foundation. It enjoys funding of four million euros within the EU’s Horizon Europe research framework, promoted by the European Commission.
“Much of current research is focused on the development of specific abilities in robots, for instance manipulation or locomotion. We, on the other hand, want to shift attention on how to orchestrate these abilities,” lead researcher Lorenzo Natale told ANSA.
Succeeding in enabling robots to operate in the real world, made up of continuous unforeseen events and interactions with the external environment, is one of the great unresolved challenges, and the Convince project has been set up to meet these needs. Over the next three and a half years, it aims to test new technological solutions to improve robots’ autonomy, focusing in particular on three different cases of use: a vacuum-cleaning robot, a robot for assembling industrial components, and a robot museum guide.
“What may seem simple operations for us actually require many different actions, decisions and unforeseen factors that must be addressed,” said Natale. Some of these unpredictable factors, he observed, can already partly be hypothesized by the developers, but others cannot. “In this latter case the robot must realize it is faced with a problem, and it must seek a solution”.
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