EU Horizon 2020 launches RobMoSys robotics software project

Summary

March 23, 2017 - RobMoSys, an EU Horizon 2020 funded project, aims at coordinating the whole community’s consorted efforts to build an open and sustainable, agile and multi- domain European robotics software ecosystem. This shall increase the scalability and quality of robotics software development, help to commoditize base functionality, such as motion control, navigation, software components of certifiable quality and achieve predictable system integration. RobMoSys (Composable Models and Software for Robotics) is an €8  million Innovation Action involving 9 partners from 5 countries and will be carried out over four years. In order to turn community involvement into active support for an ecosystem of professional quality and scope, RobMoSys enables third party participation via two open calls with cascaded funding. At the first public RobMoSys workshop, held at the European Robotics Forum in Edinburgh on Wednesday 22rd of March, the robotics community and potential end users had the opportunity to learn more about RobMoSys and its funding opportunities.

Imagine you have developed a software to localize a robot in an environment and you are interested in making it available in robotics. Imagine you as an integrator are willing to develop an application which needs a localization module and you are interested in integrating the third-party localization software on your intralogistics mobile platform.

RobMoSys’ results will

• Enable the increase of the quality of the developed component thanks to the use of formal models and validation of functional and non-functional properties supported by industry-grade tools
• Enable distribution of robotics software with a description and information about its quality, maturity and usage constraints
• Enable an integrator or end-user to integrate a localization module that was developed in a given environment (e.g. ROS, Yarp, SmartSoft, MOOS, Orocos, Reflexxes, MoveIT), in his own proprietary environment thanks to proper bridges between the platform-independent model and the target platform
• Increase the quality of the integration thanks to formal techniques implemented in industry-grade tools.

The RobMoSys project started in January 2017 with the goal of establishing a common methodology based on the use of composable software models. RobMoSys puts great importance in turning community involvement into active support for an open and sustainable European robotics software ecosystem. It envisions an integrated approach to robotic platforms by applying model-driven methods and tools on existing technologies for further use and improvement. The aim is to establish a composition-oriented approach to system-of-system integration that manages, maintains and assures system-level properties on model-level while preserving modularity and independence of existing robotics frameworks and code bases, yet can build on top of them.

Two Open Calls with cascaded funding, which make 50% of the project’s budget available, will provide important concretizations for many of the common robot functionalities. The ideas of the Open Calls will be explained at the first open workshop in Edinburgh at the European Robotics Forum (ERF), the meeting-point of robotics in Europe. Reknown experts in robotics and members of the RobMoSys core consortium, Prof. Christian Schlegel from Hochschule Ulm and Prof. Herman Bruyninckx from University of Leuven, will be available for questions. Further workshops to incorporate ideas, recommendations and requirements from the community will be held throughout the runtime of the project (to be announced on the RobMoSys website).

The RobMoSys project is coordinated by the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (France). Further partners include COMAU (Italy), Eclipse Foundation Europe (Germany), EUnited AISBL (Belgium), Hochschule Ulm (Germany), KU Leuven (Belgium), PAL ROBOTICS (Spain), SIEMENS (Germany) and Technical University of Munich (Germany).