The project aims enhancing cross-sector, international and interdisciplinary collaboration in the area of social robotics technology for care. Are robots ready for society, and is society ready for robots? How can social robots can be included in people’s lives? Robots are increasingly being used in the healthcare sector as a potential solution to the current and future challenges faced by the healthcare sector. Due to the global population ageing, by 2035 the world is projected to lack 12.9 million healthcare professionals (WHO: 2013). Social robots may benefit the quality life and wellbeing of patients, their families and healthcare professionals. Evidence and much of the needed knowledge are still lacking. Strong interdisciplinarity and cross-sectorial research and innovation activity is needed. A knowledge hub for social robotics will be created with a threefold aim: (1) To enhance the competencies of involved staff members, refining and focusing their skills; (2) To build a tri-sectoral network involving academia, industry and users of technology, and (3) to create an enduring network that will outlive the grant funding. The core of the project includes some of the strongest actors in international research, SMEs and user organisations, focusing on three activity lines: technological, sociological, care-and-welfare. To be able to understand the impact of introducing social robots in care, the three areas that will be affected by this technical evolution will be researched: (1) care provided as medical practice; this is the care given to patients in hospitals, clinics, rehabilitation centres and other medical facilities. (2) residential care - this area refers to all care institutions accepting patient/clients as residents: elderly homes, nursing homes, special needs schools for children or adults, etc. (3) family care, investigating how social robots can be implemented in the home, and as a part of domestic life.

Harmony will enable robust, flexible and safe autonomous mobile manipulation robots for use in human-centred environments by making fundamental contributions in cognitive mechatronic technologies. Our targeted application area is assistive healthcare robotics, which is motivated by the mounting pressure on our healthcare system due to factors such as Europe's ageing population. While this presents an immense challenge for the healthcare industry, it is also an opportunity to proactively meet these challenges. Our current robotic automation solutions only offer “islands of automation” where either mobility or manipulation is dealt with in isolation. Harmony aims to fill this gap in knowledge on combining both robotic mobility and manipulation modalities in complex, human-centred environments. Harmony considers two use cases identified by our end user partners: 1) the automation of just-in-time delivery tasks; and 2) the automation of hospital bioassay sample flow. These use cases highlight existing processes that require fast, reliable and flexible automation to undertake the dull and repetitive tasks that are currently conducted by over-qualified staff. Critically, these tasks require robots that can interact with the world across a wide operational spectrum, from the (sub)millimetre precision required for fine manipulation to navigating across building- and campus-scale spaces. This motivates a holistic representation of the environment that facilitates the tight integration of socially aware planning, perception and control, and allows cognitive elements such as learning, reasoning and adaptation of actions for natural interaction. Harmony gathers the required expertise to tackle these core scientific and engineering challenges. Through demonstrators and open software modules, Harmony will show that robotic mobile manipulation systems can integrate seamlessly into our existing processes and spaces to meet growing needs in the healthcare industry and beyond.