The Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production (RICAIP) unlocks the research and innovation capacity of CIIRC CTU and CEITEC BUT, by establishing a strong partnership with prominent German research organizations: DFKI and ZeMA, who jointly contribute to RICAIP by making their core facilities available and enable RICAIP to operate in a distributed way. RICAIP will be established at CIIRC CTU as an international centre operating fully in English. RICAIP will significantly contribute to upgrading the Institute from the national Centre of Excellence (CoE) in areas of informatics, robotics, and cybernetics to the European CoE of artificial intelligence and industrial robotics for advanced industry. For this purpose, RICAIP will build and develop the very first distributed testbed for advanced industrial production (RICAIP Industrial Testbed Core), that serves both academia and companies. The RICAIP Industrial Testbed Core will be established by integration of three local core facilities – the Prague testbed at CIIRC CTU, the Brno testbed at CEITEC BUT (both significantly upgraded by RICAIP), and the existing Saarbrücken Testbed – the joint facility of DFKI and ZeMA. RICAIP represents an international platform for Industry 4.0 scientific challenges as well as addressing current needs, gaps and demands of the industrial sector and society. RICAIP is a trigger for a significant upgrade of the academic and scientific environment. It promotes structural change and strikes against stereotypes and lack of innovative approaches. RICAIP benefits from its prominent governmental support and from traditionally strong industrial ties between Czech and German application sectors. The autonomy of RICAIP is supervised and guaranteed by the external Supervisory body of its stakeholders. The special status of RICAIP implying financial and organisational autonomy within the University is already internally formalised.

Industrial robots have demonstrated their capacity to answer the needs of many industrial applications, offering a high degree of dexterity, accuracy and efficiency. However, when the application requires the collaboration between the robot and the worker, including workspace sharing, it is not feasible to use standard industrial robots due to safety being compromised Recently, new robotic products have appeared on the marked claiming to be safe when used in the vicinity of humans, offering the possibility to control the force exerted in case of collision. However they lack the flexibility (in terms of possible physical configurations) or are very expensive. Furthermore, even these robots are offered as isolated products without rich perception capabilities or adequate responsive behaviours that have to be developed by the system integrators for any new manufacturing process. FourByThree proposes the development of a new generation of modular industrial robotic solutions that are suitable for efficient task execution in collaboration with humans in a safe way and are easy to use and program by the factory worker. Consortium partners in this proposal have already achieved relevant results in different technologies that are fundamental to solving the outlined problem of automating the factory floor by means of modular robots, collaborating with human workers. The approach is to adapt those results, make them more reliable and integrate them in order to achieve the final goal of the project. The acronym of the proposal refers to the two main foci of the proposal: the FOUR main characteristics of FourByThree (Modularity, Safety, Usability, Efficiency) and the THREE main actors (Humans, Robots, Environment) in the manufacturing scenarios. The proposal outlines a Business Model and a Business Plan that will be further elaborated through the project.

The project RICAIP develops the fundamental for establishing the Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production by leading research organizations from the Czech Republic: Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics at Czech Technical University, and Central European Institute of Technology at Brno University of Technology, in strong partnership with prominent German research organizations: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and Center for Mechatronics and Automation Technology. The partnership will result in transferring knowledge and expertise from the German to Czech partners, as well as strategic long-term collaboration at all the levels of research, education, and innovation. This will guarantee the unique position of the Center within the European Research Area as a leader in the research field of advanced industrial production. The RICAIP Center will accommodate new areas of research and innovation in the field of Industry 4.0, namely multi-site production and production system development. The Centre will provide a distributed, but virtually integrated experimental testbed. It will be physically based on research facilities of the Czech partners, complemented by a corresponding remote site jointly operated by the German partners. The project’s ambition is to establish an international hub for Industry 4.0 bringing new smart, safe and sophisticated solutions for industrial multi-site production of the future. This project, however, goes beyond the state-of-the-art reference models of Industry 4.0 as it introduces a brand new dimension of the initiative - multi-site industrial production and production development, both with strong impact on society. The long-term vision is to transform the RICAIP testbed into a European Research Infrastructure in the field of Industry 4.0.

Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) e.g. osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, joint & ligament wear, frailty fractures and associated complications in elderly are a severe threat frequently leading to a permanent decline of the patient’s general health and autonomy. NCD prevention is highly relevant to reduce the need for long-term care. The economic burden is expected to increase by 65% from 2020 to 2040 with a strong negative impact on patient’s quality of life. SmILE will provide a cross-sectoral, early risk detection methodology by holistic analysis of elderly patients’ health data. Co-creation with end-users and consideration of diverse needs, mental and physical abilities, living and socio-economic conditions as well as life-situation of older people are implemented. This includes training and enhanced stream of information to patients and other stakeholders. It will offer an AI-based patient analysis, incl. integration of smart wearables and medical devices incl. implants to support monitoring of general health status. Our approach will disrupt the cycle of frailty by minimizing physical decline and risk of re-fractures. To enhance the AI functions, new data sources will be established by instrumenting medical devices, mainly implants, to augment them into monitoring and actively supporting devices. SMILE will: (1) develop an integrated platform to collect, centralize, manage, analyze and share multimorbid geriatric patient data using technology such as AI & machine learning; (2) establish a pan-European bottom-up model of good governance of health data being patient-centered and patient-controlled in line with current regulations; and (3) establish a solution driven by the needs of citizens and patients of old age. SMILE will establish a new approach of outcome-monitoring to provide patient centered, personalized and integrated treatment of elderly NCD patients to improve quality of life, enable real empowerment and ease the financial burden in an ageing society.