In-No-Plastic’s goal is to develop and demonstrate nano-, micro, and macro-plastic clean-up technologies in the aquatic ecosystems. The approach taken is a combination of social and technical removal strategies targeting the industrial hotspots through cooling water systems (CWS), harbours, lagoons, shores and the shallow sea water. The technical approach comprises of comparing the existing removal approaches (tendering), with multiple developing technologies at varying testing sites in Europe and in the Caribbean for the removal of nano/micro/macro-plastics. The approach entails a comprehensive monitoring system to gather data at frequencies of every 6 month for 2 years. This is done to understand the effectiveness of the new technologies and current clean-up approaches both in terms of cutting down plastic presence in the environment and its effects on the marine and local ecosystem. The technical approach will be a blueprint in establishing a coherent and synchronized system of cleaning, that is scalable and replicable. The social strategy comprises of an incentive-based initiative that relies on a remote application. The focus is to get the local population involved by incentivising plastic pick-up in return for monetary gain or other rewards. With the plastic gathered at the demo sites, it is to be treated for reusability by investigating different recycling approaches. This would allow to close the loop and achieve circularity. The approaches include a.o. replacement of fossil fuels for a Steel Mill, where its produced syngas is sent to a chemical plant as raw material to produce chemicals. The added value of the approach is the inter-connectedness of the processes in acquiring plastic waste and creating circularity in the value chain. The complementary consortium of 17 partners from 10 different countries, including 2 research organizations, 2 Government, 4 Industry End Users, 2 NGO, 7 SME of which 4 technology providers and 3 service providers.

Maintaining the competitiveness and leadership position of crucial industries such as renewable energy and agriculture, is contingent upon AI and Robotics increasingly becoming a widespread and integral part of the relevant technological landscapes, particularly in the face of steep labour shortages. ARISE project aims to introduce a combination of perception and control modules around a reconfigurable robotic manipulator that will enable a step change in the level of automation of complex manipulation tasks. ARISE will comprise the following key novel technology components that will significantly push the state of the art in terms of automatic task segmentation, human robot interaction and complex manipulation: (1) Two reconfigurable pneumatic-based robotic manipulators mounted on a mobile robotic platform (2) Novel soft end-effectors with variable stiffness that will allow for a diverse set of manipulation tasks (3) A Robotic perception module comprising 3D vision algorithms (4) A Localisation and Mapping module that will allow the robot to accurately identify its position within the environment (5) A Semantic Mapping module powered by scene understanding algorithms (6) A Knowledge Representation framework that will capture important information regarding objects’ properties and relationships (7) A Hierarchical Imitation Learning framework for acquiring robotic skills to accomplish complex tasks directly from human demonstrators (8) A Human-Interaction conditioned Path and Task planning module enabling reactive robot control (9) An edge-AI framework for deploying Machine Learning models and computer vision algorithms at the edge in a streamlined fashion. The ARISE toolchain will be integrated and validated in 5 real use case scenarios including installation and repair, and transplanting and harvesting tasks, in solar and hydroponic farms, respectively.