During the past few years many projects and initiatives were undertaken deploying and testing Automated Vehicles (AVs) for public transportation and logistics. However in spite of their ambition, all of these projects stayed on the level of elaborated experimentation and never reached the level of a large-scale commercial deployment of transport services. The reasons for this are many, the most important being the lack of economically viable and commercially realistic models, the lack of scalability of the business and operating models, and the lack of user oriented services required for large end-user adoption of the solutions. The ULTIMO project will create the very first economically feasible and sustainable integration of AVs for MaaS public transportation and LaaS urban goods transportation. ULTIMO aims to deploy in three sites in Europe 15 or more multi-vendor SAE L4 AVs per site. A user centric holistic approach, applied throughout the project, will ensure that all elements in a cross-sector business environment are incorporated to deliver large-scale on-demand, door-to-door, well-accepted, shared, seamless-integrated and economically viable CCAM services. We target the operation without safety driver on-board, in a fully automated and mission management mode with the support of innovative user centric passenger services. ULTIMO’s innovative transportation models are designed for a long-term sustainable impact on automated transportation in Europe, around the globe and on society. The composition of the consortium ensures the interoperability between multiple stakeholders by making adoption of new technology at minimum costs and maximum safety. The integration of the ongoing experiments of previous AV-demonstrator projects ensures highest possible technical and societal impacts from the very beginning of the project, as well as during the project lifetime and even long after its completion.

The EUROBENCH project aims at creating the first benchmarking framework for robotic systems in Europe. The framework will allow companies and researchers to test the performance of robots at any stage of development. The project will primarily focus on bipedal machines, i.e. exoskeletons, prosthetics and humanoids, but will be designed to be easily extended to other robotic domains. The EUROBENCH framework will be composed of: - A methodological component, which will include methods and metrics to calculate the System Ability Levels of a robotic system. These methods will be integrated in a professional software tool to permit its wide use across domains and laboratory conditions. The main goal of this unified software is to facilitate the use of benchmarking methodology at all levels from research to pre-commercial prototyping. - An experimental component, which will concentrate the state-of-the-art test benches in two facilities, one for wearable robots (including exoskeletons and prostheses), and one for humanoid robots. These facilities will allow companies and researchers to perform standardized tests on advanced robotic prototypes in a unique location, saving resources and time, and preparing for certification processes. During the project, the Consortium will provide Financial Support to Third Parties interested in: - Designing and developing specific test benches or benchmarking methods. These solutions will be integrated into the framework, and made available to the industrial and academic community. - Using the framework, at zero-costs, to test the performance of different kinds of robots. This will allow to validate the EUROBENCH outputs and prepare for the exploitation of results. The successful achievement of these goals will put Europe in the lead on providing the groundwork for the evaluation of robotic systems, facilitating the process of bringing innovative robotic technologies forward to market.

Facing to the challenge of future highly automated vehicles, where occupants can freely orient themselves to engage in non-driving activities. This new environment prompts questions about how car occupants will actually sit, what activities they will engage in, and how they will informed through the HMI to keep them in the loop if necessary. AWARE2ALL aims to pave the way towards Highly Automated Vehicles (HAVs) deployment in traffic, by effectively addressing the changes in road safety and changes in the interaction of different road users caused by the emergence of HAV through the development of innovative technologies along with the corresponding assessment tools and methodologies. AWARE2ALL will develop safety and HMI systems that will be interrelated through achieving a holistic understanding of the scene to ensure safe operation of the HAV. AWARE2ALL proposes a common conceptual universal safety framework for considering Human Machine Interaction (HMI). The project will be built on the results of projects funded under H2020 and other R&D programmes addressing the identification of new safety-critical situations and the most likely positions and postures considering the expected HAV applications. The main objective of AWARE2ALL is to address the new safety challenges posed by the introduction of HAVs in mixed road traffic, through the development of inclusive and innovative safety (passive and active) and HMI (interior and exterior) systems that will consider the variety of population and will objectively demonstrate relevant improvements in mixed traffic safety.

GENEX project aims at developing a novel end-to-end digital twin-driven framework based on enhanced computational models, which embed the interdisciplinary knowledge of the aircraft components and the manufacturing/repairing processes, to support the optimized manufacturing of composites parts, enable the continuous operation of aircrafts and improve the composites repairing processes for ensuring aircraft´s safety and airworthiness. First, automated ATL process coupled with THz-based in-process monitoring together with hybrid-twin simulation methods will be developed for eco-efficient and advance manufacturing of innovative reprocessable-repairable-recyclable (3R)-resin-and state-of-the-art thermoplastic composites. Second, innovative data- and physics-based machine learning algorithms for damage detection and location combined with advanced high-performance computing (HPC)-based multi-physics and artificial intelligent-powered digital twin tools for fatigue life prediction, will be implemented to transform information from optimized onboard piezoresistive sensors data networks interfaced with low-power wireless communication platform to health and usage assessment and prognosis. Third, augmented reality tools together with novel laser-assisted methods for surface cleaning and monitoring , smart monitoring and in-situ tailored heating of composite repair blankets will be further developed to provide additional assistance in manual scarf repair operations , increasing reliability of repair process, while supporting the modification and virtual certification of MRO practices. Thus, a novel digital twin-driven framework will be implemented into a common IIoT platform to integrate the developed models and data acquired, providing bidirectional dataflow, and enabling the implementation of a holistic and comprehensive data management methodology ensuring to adequately create, capture, share, and reuse knowledge along the entire aircraft lifecycle.

Ground Truth 2.0 delivers the demonstration and validation of six scaled up citizen observatories in real operational conditions both in the EU and in Africa. It will strengthen the full feedback-loop in the information chain from citizen-based data collection to knowledge sharing for joint decision-making and cooperative planning. The project focuses on environmental indicators in urban and rural areas related to spatial planning issues, with a specific focus on flora and fauna as well as water availability and water quality for land and natural resources management. This is supported by an innovative web-based service for worldwide mapping and updating of land use. The overall objectives of Ground Truth 2.0 are to implement sustainable citizen observatories for the demonstration of their societal and economic benefits, and the global market uptake of the Ground Truth 2.0 concept and enabling technologies. The trans-disciplinary Ground Truth 2.0 approach consists of a multi-actor innovation process to combine the social dimensions of citizen observatories with enabling technologies so that their customisation and deployment is tailored to the envisaged societal and economic impacts of the observatories. The demonstration cases (4 EU and 2 African) cover the full 'spectrum’ of citizen-sensed data usage and citizen engagement, and therefore allow testing and validating of the concept and technologies, and evaluation of their impacts under a range of conditions. The Ground Truth 2.0 consortium presents a good mix of industry, SME, NGO, government, research and academia to ensure the roll out and uptake of the observatories. Ground Truth 2.0 is coordinating and interacting with other relevant initiatives, such as GEOSS, INSPIRE as well as the sister projects funded under the same call (namely GROW, SCENT and LANDSENSE) to create mutual synergies.