Border authorities and Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) across Europe face important challenges in how they patrol and protect the borders. Their work becomes more problematic considering the heterogeneity of threats, the wideness of the surveyed area, the adverse weather conditions and the wide range of terrains. Although there are several research tools and works targeting these areas independently for border surveillance, nowadays border authorities do not have access to an intelligent holistic solution providing all aforementioned functionalities. Towards delivering such a solution, ROBORDER aims at developing and demonstrating a fully-functional autonomous border surveillance system with unmanned mobile robots including aerial, water surface, underwater and ground vehicles, capable of functioning both as standalone and in swarms, which will incorporate multimodal sensors as part of an interoperable network. The system will be equipped with adaptable sensing and robotic technologies that can operate in a wide range of operational and environmental settings. To provide a complete and detailed situational awareness picture that supports highly efficient operations, the network of sensors will include static networked sensors such as border surveillance radars, as well as mobile sensors customised and installed on board unmanned vehicles. To succeed implementing an operational solution, a number of supplementary technologies will also be applied that will enable the establishment of robust communication links between the command and control unit and the heterogeneous robots. On top of this, detection capabilities for early identification of criminal activities and hazardous incidents will be developed. This information will be forwarded to the command and control unit that will enable the integration of large volumes of heterogeneous sensor data and the provision of a quick overview of the situation at a glance to the operators, supporting them in their decisions.

The METRICS project will organise challenge-led robotics competitions inThe METRICS project will organise challenge-led robotics competitions in the four Priority Areas (PAs) identified in the topic ICT-09-2019-2020: Healthcare, Inspection and Maintenance, Agri-Food, and Agile Production. METRICS is designed to organise competitions as reproducible and objective evaluation campaigns and aims to structure in a sustainable way the European robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) community around the four PAs. In order to assess the reliability of the different competing robots in a rigorous and unbiased way, METRICS will develop an evaluation framework based on metrological principles. For each competition, METRICS will organize 3 field evaluation campaigns (in physical environments) and 3 cascade evaluation campaigns (on datasets) to engage with the AI community. The competitions are designed to draw attention from the entire economic sector, the academia and Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH) in Europe, while stimulating public engagement. Indeed, METRICS will implement a dedicated strategy to mobilize external partners and sponsors to support the organization of the competitions or ensure their industrial relevance. A specific outreach strategy will be developed to promote robotics systems towards the general public and ensure the compliance of robots with ethical and socio-economic principles. METRICS brings together 17 partners, all expert in robotics competition and metrology, with highly complementary testing facilities and networks in the four PAs. This experienced consortium will ensure that METRICS benefits from the feedback of past and current competitions and projects and is highly complementary with European initiatives and networks (e.g. DIH). Thus, METRICS will contribute to structuring a sustainable network of European robotics stakeholders in the four PAs through the organisation of industry-relevant competitions based on robust evaluations methods.

Our oceans are the least-explored region of planet Earth. Protection and sustainable development of ocean resources presents formidable challenges. Robots will play an increasingly key role in the near future and this role will expand and become more challenging as we extend into deeper, remote and hostile marine environments. Europe leads in many aspects of maritime, but lacks well integrated and coordinated oceanic robotic infrastructure or presence. The marine-robotics industry is growing rapidly. It is a crucial high-value/high-cost sector with considerable entry-barriers to R&D. The full growth potential of this industry will be greatly enhanced with access to shared robotic research infrastructure. EUMarineRobots (EUMR) proposes an access-infrastructure for the deployment of a full-range of aerial, surface and sub-surface marine robotic assets, the combined value of which is far greater than the sum of their parts. EUMR will open transnational access to significant national marine robotics R&D assets across Europe. The EUMR consortium comprises 15 partners from 10 countries who, collectively, can deploy a comprehensive portfolio of marine robotic assets with required associated support assets and expertise. The network is a strong and balanced grouping of globally distinguished key players with diverse, track-record of excellence across marine / robotic sectors. Partners are members of a wide variety of existing networks, and research infrastructure collaborations both formal and informal across Europe and the world. EUMR is a first stage in aggregating these networks and assets as world-leading for support and growth of a strong community of practice in marine robotics and marine.