EUROPA

EUROPA - European Robotic Pedestrian Assistant is a project funded by the European Commission within FP7. The goal of the EUROPA project is to develop the foundations for service robots designed to autonomously navigate in urban environments outdoors as well as in shopping malls and shops to provide various services to users including guidance, delivery, and transportation.

Goals

In the field of robotics, there has recently been a tremendous progress in the development of autonomous robots that offer various services to their users. Typical services include support of elderly people, cleaning, transportation and delivery tasks, exploration of inaccessible hazardous environments, or surveillance. Most of the systems developed so far, however, are restricted to indoor scenarios, non-urban outdoor environments, or road usage with cars. There is serious lack of capabilities of mobile robots to navigate safely in highly populated outdoor environments. This ability, however, is a key competence for a series of robotic applications.

The goal of the EUROPA project is to bridge this gap and to develop the foundations for service robots designed to autonomously navigate in urban environments outdoors as well as in shopping malls and shops to provide various services to users including guidance, delivery, and transportation. EUROPA will develop and apply sophisticated probabilistic scene interpretation techniques to deal with the unpredictable and changing environments. Based on data gathered with its sensors, the robot will acquire a detailed model of the environment, detect and track moving objects in the environment, adapt its navigation behavior according to the current situation, and communicate with its users in a natural way, even remotely. Key innovations of the project are made by robustly and reliable addressing the autonomous navigation problem in complex and populated environments, the ability to build appropriate spatial models, and by reasoning about them based on the verbal and natural interaction with users. EUROPA is targeted at developing novel technologies that will open new perspectives for commercial applications of service robots in the future.

To validate the concepts developed in the project, the EUROPA robot will be deployed in populated urban environments such as the downtown area of Zurich, Switzerland, to solve a series of tasks including transportation and guidance.

Consortium

Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg - Autonomous Intelligent Systems Lab The autonomous intelligent systems (AIS) lab of the University of Freiburg is concerned with techniques for autonomous navigation, state estimation, and control in the context of mobile robotics and artificial intelligence. One of the major research areas covered by this lab is mobile robot navigation.

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich - Autonomous Systems Lab The Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich ETHZ is an internationally renowned research lab in the field of autonomous robot design and navigation. It has a large experience in the design and autonomous navigation of wheeled and flying autonomous robots for different kinds of environments.

KU Leuven - Center for the Processing of Speech and Images The team of KU Leuven that will work on the project is part of the Center for the Processing of Speech and Images (PSI), one of the units within the department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT). This team - VISICS (VISion for Industry, Communications, and Services) - is specialized in computer vision and its applications, and focuses on the sub-domains of 3D acquisition and modeling, as well as on object and object class recognition.

University of Oxford - Mobile Robotics & Computational Linguistics Group Two groups of the University of Oxford, namely the Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) and the Computational Linguistics Group (CLG) are involved in EUROPA. The MRG has an international reputation in the area of robot navigation especially when it comes to operating in outdoor environments with well engineered vehicles and complex real-time software. Complementing the information theoretic research within MRG, the group possesses a strong culture of in-field experimental validation. The CLG at Oxford provides an environment in which postdoctoral workers and doctoral students work together on a wide variety of projects including several FP6 projects. The CLG has good connections with related groups in the university, including Robotics, Linguistics and Phonetics, as well as the nearby Sharp Research labs. Much recent work has combined traditional, knowledge-based approaches with statistical and machine learning methods.

BlueBotics BlueBotics SA is a Swiss SME located in Lausanne. It is a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) founded in 2001 with the mission to market innovative and promising mobile robotics technologies. BlueBotics's domain of expertise covers the engineering of mechatronic systems including integration, design, prototyping, and production. BlueBotics has full control over the development of the whole range of products, allowing for rapid reaction to custom requirements with competitive prices.

RWTH Aachen University - Mobile Multimedia Group The Mobile Multimedia group at RWTH Aachen University has been newly founded with the goal of performing basic research and developing applications in visual object recognition and tracking from mobile devices and robotic platforms.