In recent years the manufacturing sector has been one of the stable pillars of European economic growth and therefore prosperity. Photonics, as one of the advanced technologies for industry identified by the European Union, is a relevant deep technology that plays a key role in supporting and innovating the manufacturing ecosystem. On the European landscape several initiatives exist that facilitate cooperation on Photonics, ranging from the public private partnership Photonics21, to European wide clusters like EPIC association and the Digital innovation hub Photonhub Europe. However, they focus mainly on support for individual organisations and while there is also the S3 platform partnership on Photonics, there is no support available to coordinate interregional cooperation in deeptech with the focus on Photonics for manufacturing. Goal of the project is the establishment of an interregional deeptech innovation support network for manufacturing with the focus on Photonics. Output will be a joint supra-regional strategy with best-practice measures for the use of Deeptech/Photonics to support European missions and company competitiveness. This strategy will be co-developed by relevant regional stakeholders from the government body, research, industry and makers communities and include tangible steps to use the complementarities and cooperation potential of the regions to ensure cross-fertilisation.

CONCERT has a clear focus on developing robotics technologies aiming at a novel concept of configurable robot platforms, which can be explored in application domains with unstructured, variable and evolving workspace settings and tasks. It targets to make a step transition from the current general-purpose lower power collaborative robots to a new generation of collaborative platforms that can safely collaborate in tasks with demanding human-scale forces while ensuring safety on the fly, implement efficient collaboration principles and demonstrate quick adaptability to address less standardized and more unstructured environment and task settings. It proposes the development of a new paradigm of high power/strength, adaptable, collaborative robots, which leverages on modular and configurable robot hardware with adaptive physical capabilities. automatic deployment of control and online safety verification methods. Multi-modal and multi-state perception and supervision tools provides enhanced human, robot and task execution awareness enabling the implementation of adaptive shared autonomy and role allocation planning in human robot collaboration. The development of the CONCERT technologies is steered by use-case scenarios from the construction industry, a sector with significantly high socio-economic impact, offering at the same time an extremely challenging, yet highly motivating and pertinent domain for demonstrating and validating the quick deployment and interoperability features of the CONCERT configurable collaborative robotic solutions. The project technologies will be therefore validated in relevant construction task activities exhibiting high payloads and diverse workspace size and settings, thus requiring different robot arrangements to perform them. The assessment methodology considers several indicators covering the technical, functional, occupational, labor effort, and societal aspects and impacts of the CONCERT technologies.

Assistant for Quality Check during Construction Execution Processes for Energy-efficienT buildings Problem: What the consortium sees as a major problem today is the potential loss of benefits of energy-efficient building components because of the lack of knowledge or bad implementation during the construction processes. Solution: During the project ACCEPT will be created – An assistant for quality check during construction execution processes for energy-efficienT buildings. The assistant will run on Smart Glasses and unobtrusively guide workers during the construction on site. This provides a standardized and coordinated process for all workers, ensuring that all benefits of energy-efficient building components are maintained. From a user perspective ACCEPT is focused on the following very clear main results: 1. The Construction Operator Assistant App (CoOpApp) running on Smart Glasses, which passively collects data and actively provides guidance to the worker on site during the building process. (Pillar I: Advanced Knowledge Transfer for Energy-efficient Construction) 2. A Site Manager App (SiMaApp) running on a mobile device, which allows to remotely coordinate the working process as well as collect additional data on site by different sensors. (Pillar II: Agile Project Coordination for Bridging Heterogeneity) 3. An interactive web-based Dashboard as a monitoring and quality assurance solution. The Dashboard will use self-inspection methods to determine important characteristics such as U-Values. (Pillar III: Adaptive Quality Assurance with Self-Inspection Features) The project is fully build around achieving a maximum of impaxt: The three results will be accompanied by 7 real-world pilots grouped into 3 piloting areas within the project. Pilots are located in 4 different EU countries.

EE4M addresses the increasing needs for training, re-, and upskilling of engineers in the mobility value chain from raw material to recycling and back into the loop. In recent years, the mobility value chain in Europe is significantly influenced by a multitude of hyper-dynamic factors, like changing consumer behavior, disruptive technologies, the need for decarbonization initiatives, hyperlocal mobility, etc. which leads to the fact that a continuous realignment of engineering education is indispensable for the long-term success. EE4M focuses on operations management (OM) as the main area of activity for engineers in the mobility value chain which is changing due to the two pre-dominant drivers “Industry 4.0” (smart OM) and “Sustainability” (sustainable OM). EE4M focuses on the professional development of smart and sustainability competences of engineers in the mobility value chain through innovative vocational educational modules supported by a transnational platform between the main drivers of the European mobility value chain (Austria, Greece, Italy, Spain). The innovation of EE4M can be explained by the fact that the entire value chain in the mobility sector serves as the basis for the empirically-based realignment of engineering education to create requirement-orientated competence profiles. During the EE4M project, more than 1,000 VET teachers/trainers, practitioners, and students from all over Europe within EQF levels 4-8 will be enabled to acquire transdisciplinary skills in the field of smart and sustainable OM through innovative teaching and learning environments. A foundation for inclusive and borderless European VET education is to be laid to produce competent and well-trained VET students, graduates/professionals, and teachers. Boosting (inter)national skills ecosystems will successfully increase European competitiveness and employability, professionalize the European VET engineering education, and contribute to economic, ecologic, and social wellbeing.