UNCHAIN will “break the chains”, boosting the cooperation between public authorities and logistics stakeholders. It will create a set of services for optimal and flexible urban logistics operation, management, planning and policymaking, unleashing the potential that technology and digitalisation can bring to the sustainable urban logistics and moving towards climate-neutral and smart cities. UNCHAIN will implement a standardised and reliable data exchange ecosystem supported by a public-private collaborative framework that will allow the establishment of reliable data sharing agreements, break data silos and make the urban freight data more available and accessible. Driven by the unlocked data, an innovative set of 12 urban logistics services will be implemented to optimise the allocation of urban space, improve the policy-making capacity of local authorities and optimise network management and logistics operation. With UNCHAIN, public authorities will improve their data collection capabilities and have the right tools to achieve sustainability goals. Meanwhile, for operators, having services aligned with their own and society's objectives will unlock mutually beneficial cooperation schemes, a key factor for long-term collaboration and the establishment of sustainable urban freight transport policies and operations. 10 European cities will participate in UNCHAIN activities: Madrid, Berlin and Florence as living labs; Prague, Mechelen, Madeira and Riga as follower cities, and Brest metropole, Ravenna and Alba Iulia as peer- cities supporting the early adoption of the results. Also, the well-balanced representation of the urban logistics industry, with DHL and UPS, will ensure large-scale impact and feasibility of the project results.

As robots are entering unstructured environments with a large variety of tasks, they will need to quickly acquire new abilities to solve them. Humans do so very effectively through a variety of methods of knowledge transfer – demonstration, verbal explanation, writing, the Internet. In robotics, enabling the transfer of skills and software between robots, tasks, research groups, and application domains will be a game changer for scaling up the robot abilities. euROBIN therefore proposes a threefold strategy: First, leading experts from the European robotics and AI research community will tackle the questions of transferability in four main scientific areas: 1) boosting physical interaction capabilities, to increase safety and reliability, as well as energy efficiency 2) using machine learning to acquire new behaviors and knowledge about the environment and the robot and to adapt to novel situations 3) enabling robots to represent, exchange, query, and reason about abstract knowledge 4) ensuring a human-centric design paradigm, that takes the needs and expectations of humans into account, making AI-enabled robots accessible, usable and trustworthy. Second, the relevance of the scientific outcomes will be demonstrated in three application domains that promise to have substantial impact on industry, innovation, and civil society in Europe. 1) robotic manufacturing for a circular economy 2) personal robots for enhanced quality of life 3) outdoor robots for sustainable communities. Advances are made measurable by collaborative competitions. Finally, euROBIN will create a sustainable network of excellence to foster exchange and inclusion. Software, data and knowledge will be exchanged over the EuroCore repository, designed to become a central platform for robotics in Europe. The vision of euROBIN is a European ecosystem of robots that share their data and knowledge and exploit their diversity to jointly learn to perform the endless variety of tasks in human environments.