ULTIMATE

Artificial Intelligence has entered the business mainstream, opening opportunities to boost productivity and innovation but suffer limitations hindering wider adoption of model-based or data-driven AI algorithms in industrial settings. Both approaches complement each other and form a critical foundation for the adoption of AI in industry. However, hybrid AI does not fully address the issue of trust (validity, explainability, and ethics).

ULTIMATE will pioneer the development of industrial-grade hybrid AI based on three stages to ensure trustworthiness, relying on interdisciplinary data sources and adhering to physical constraints (1st stage), as well as the development of tools for explaining, evaluating and validating hybrid AI algorithms and asserting their adherence to ethical and legal regulations (2nd stage). These will be exemplified using real-world industrial use cases (3rd stage) in the Robotics (collaboration between human and robots for logistics activities) and Space domains (Failure detection for satellites) to promote the widespread adoption of hybrid AI in industry.

The breakthrough generic hybrid AI architectures with improved explainability and interpretability and the predictive model on trustworthiness developed in ULTIMATE will provide industry:

This will be beneficial to European industry to gain pre-emptive advantage in the market of industrial AI solutions and will eventually increase trustworthiness in the use of hybrid AI components by the wider public.

The ULTIMATE project brings together key industrial stakeholders, with relevant end-users from manufacturing sectors, leading academic and research institutions, and SMEs to collaboratively investigate and lead the development of hybrid AI approaches.

ROBOTNIK IN THE PROJECT:

Robotnik participates in the ULTIMATE project as an end-user, providing a use case for the automation of a kitting process, that is the placing of several components with different sizes and shapes into an ordered set in a container, i.e. a kit.

To execute this use case, Robotnik provides a RB-KAIROS+, the mobile manipulator robot that will execute advanced AI algorithms to detect and identify the components on the workbench, compute the order to pick the components and where to place them, find the best grasping pose and calculate and follow the arm trajectories to execute the different operations.

This is an interesting use case from the Industry 4.0 perspective, as it gives the opportunity to easily customize the creation of kits for different industries and areas, such as in-house logistics or package preparation.