VOCORDER develops innovative components based on disruptive technologies that aims to render breath analysis testing a holistic, highly efficient health monitoring apparatus that can be seamlessly integrated into everyday life. The project capitalizes on recent developments on mid-infrared lasers and moves the technology well beyond the state-of-the-art to demonstrate at TRL5 a highly efficient multiple species (gases) breath analysers that can with a 5 sec use of the device, and the use of artificial intelligence-based signal processing, can conclude on the health status of the individual, just like the fictional Star Trek Tricorder. To record and analyze the maximum amount of information on the individual health status completely unobtrusively, exhaled breath is among the most convenient body fluids as can be obtained at large quantities, practically without any causing discomfort to the user, with strong potentially to seamlessly integrate into everyday life. Exhaled breath contains more than 1000 substances which can serve as efficient biomarkers, the measurement of concentration of which can provide a clear provision of the health status of the individual while the diagnosis of some diseases or pathological process in human body can be obtained early. For a truly seamlessly integration in a plethora of settings, VOCORDER examines the ways to render the final instrument compact and potentially inexpensive.

CHAMELEON's vision is to introduce, develop, test and evaluate an integrated network of collaborating agents, equipped with advanced sensing and cognitive capabilities that can support multiple - missions at tactical level. While UVs are highly specialized systems manufactured by different providers, they all implement the CHAMELEON specifications, enabling all common features necessary to take part in the surveillance tasks foreseen by the use cases. As such, CHAMELEON aspires to exploit already well-established technologies and tools that have reach adequate maturity, towards offering a complex interoperable and reconfigurable system capable of supporting a wide set of heterogeneous missions in diverse environmental conditions. CHAMELEON innovation lies on a novel reconfigurable drone, the CHAMELEON drone, able to modify its configuration and sizing upon demand, which can be deployed in homogenous or heterogeneous groups to support complex scenarios, as well as a set of existing heterogeneous, modular, interoperable, networked UVs systems. CHAMELEON Drones will be able to adapt its operation from a number of available services or application through CHAMELEON App-store. CHAMELEON will organize two open calls to attract and select the best SMEs from across the continent. SMEs will be funded to generate AI supported products, processes, and business models with strong market potential across the proposed clusters. Besides a total financial support of ~€600.000, CHAMELEON will provide technical and business mentorship to the selected SMEs. Open Calls will also lead towards the industrial applicability of the proposed tools and services without EC funding: it is envisioned that an estimated of 10 applications will be submitted through CHAMELEON and will be enriched with AI components. The CHAMELEON solution will be demonstrated and validated under relevant operating conditions in 3 pilot sites in 3 European countries.

The importance of our seas and oceans to the economy and societal well-being is broadly acknowledged. In addition, offshore infrastructure in the form of ports, wind farms, aquaculture facilities, natural gas pipes, etc. has continuously expanded and has become more commonplace in recent years. Activities associated with seabed mapping, monitoring of the health and status of marine habitats, offshore infrastructure inspection, seabed mining and underwater sensing have traditionally been based on the use of crewed support vessels which are expensive to run and have limited endurance. The MERLIN project seeks to exploit long-endurance operational capabilities offered through the use of hydrogen fuel cells and renewable energy installed onboard Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV) and Autonomous Underwater Vessels (AUVs) which are capable of navigating and operating autonomously based on AI algorithms without the need for human intervention. A Mission Remote Control Centre (MRCC) will permit data from the autonomous vessels to be transmitted to base. Conversely, the MRCC will allow the transmission of commands from the supervisor to the robotic vehicles. The vehicles will incorporate advanced surface and underwater grasping capability for the collection of samples, handling, installation and recovery of sensors using custom-built robotic arms. The USV will provide geotagging reference data to the AUVs when they operate underwater and be able to track them during the mission. The USV will be able to navigate from its base to the location of the mission where the AUVs will be released. At the end of the mission the AUVs will dock again with the USV so they can be safely returned to base. The vehicles will be capable of operating independently as well as in combination with support vessels . The demonstration activities include three different high value use cases, including marine habitat monitoring, underwater volcano seabed mapping, and port infrastructure inspection.

Carbo4Power will develop a new generation of lightweight, high strength, multifunctional, digitalized multi-materials for offshore wind and tidal turbine rotor blades that will increase their operational performance and durability while reducing the cost of energy production (bellow 10 ct€/ kWh for wind turbines and 15ct€/kWh for tidal), maintenance and their environmental impact. The innovative concept is based on nano-engineered hybrid (multi)materials and their intelligent architectures which breaks down as follows: i) Nanocomposites based on dynamic thermosets with inherent recyclability and repairability and tailored nano-reinforcements to enhance mechanical properties. ii) Multifunctional nano-enabled coatings to improve turbine protection (e.g. against lightning and biofouling (eg. 50% fouling release). iii) Blade segments will be designed and fabricated by advanced net-shape automated multi-material composite technologies that will allow ca. 20% scrap reduction. The approach for WTB is to deliver innovative design of modular rotor blade, while the approach for TTB is aimed towards an optimal design for 'one-shot' manufacture. v) Recycling of blade materials will be increased up to 95% due to the advanced functionalities of 3R resins and adhesives with debonding on demand properties. The strategic goal is to provide the frame which will create new pathways for manufacturing of FRPs for multiple processing life cycles, and explore the emerging valorisation opportunities in offshore energy sector. A multidisciplinary team of 18 partners (8 SMEs) from 8 countries provides technological know-how and industrial leadership, with well-balanced dissemination, communication & exploitation impact.

Despite the indisputable benefits of AI, humans typically have little visibility and knowledge on how AI systems make any decisions or predictions due to the so-called “black-box effect” in which many of the machine learning/deep learning algorithms are not able to be examined after their execution to understand specifically how and why a decision has been made. The inner workings of machine learning and deep learning are not exactly transparent, and as algorithms become more complicated, fears of undetected bias, mistakes, and miscomprehensions creeping into decision making, naturally grow among manufacturers and practically any stakeholder In this context, Explainable AI (XAI) is today an emerging field that aims to address how black box decisions of AI systems are made, inspecting and attempting to understand the steps and models involved in decision making to increase human trust. XMANAI aims at placing the indisputable power of Explainable AI at the service of manufacturing and human progress, carving out a “human-centric”, trustful approach that is respectful of European values and principles, and adopting the mentality that “our AI is only as good as we are”. XMANAI, demonstrated in 4 real-life manufacturing cases, will help the manufacturing value chain to shift towards the amplifying AI era by coupling (hybrid and graph) AI "glass box" models that are explainable to a "human-in-the-loop" and produce value-based explanations, with complex AI assets (data and models) management-sharing-security technologies to multiply the latent data value in a trusted manner, and targeted manufacturing apps to solve concrete manufacturing problems with high impact.