INESC TEC

The aim of this supporting action is the planning and the organization of the World Manufacturing Forum 2015 (WMF2015) to be held in the second semester of 2015. Keeping the WMF2015 in Europe is pivotal in order to retain the European leadership in key Manufacturing enabling technologies. The aim of this specific proposal is the planning and the organization of an event that can represent the flagship initiatives for the year 2015. In order to take advantage of the previous successful experience and reputation accomplished, the event will be called World Manufacturing Forum 2015. Strategic objectives of the event are: • To be an open and independent environment where industry leaders and key policy makers from all over the world, together with all relevant stakeholder, will discuss global trends, challenges threats and objectives in Manufacturing to give authorities in policy, science and industries advice for the orientation of innovation perspectives for a global competitive and sustainable development; • To be a platform where the most recent state-of-the-art of the Manufacturing research is spread and disseminated at the same time where the most interesting trends and research needs are identified, discussed and shared among interested parties and involved communities; • To be a platform for the communication of the European Commission strategies and policies to a global audience; • To be an ambitious event to present results of the European cooperative research, to support the Horizon2020 and to discuss about international cooperation in R&D; • To create visibility and better synergies between industrial and social initiatives launched by the Commission and by the Member States in a fair interplay with the other global regions.

It is the purpose of EuConNeCts4, a Supporting Action, to organise the following 2 editions, 2020 and 2021, of the EC supported conference in the area of communication networks and systems (EuCNC - European Conference on Networks and Communications), continuing the successful organisation of this conference since 2014. EuCNC will continue to serve as a technical and scientific conference for researchers, namely European ones, to show their work in the area of Telecommunications, focusing on communication networks and systems, and also reaching services and applications. The conference will not be restricted to European researchers, rather aiming at attracting others from all the other regions in the world. It will also serve as a showcase for the work developed by projects co-financed by the EC, namely those arising from H2020 calls, and more specifically, those addressing 5G and beyond. Nonetheless, it also aims at attracting works in the area of communication networks and systems from other objectives. EuCNC will: 1) be a European conference, but with a large international dimension; 2) showcase the R&D activities performed within EC programmes, directly and indirectly; 3) showcase the cooperation in R&D between European organisations and worldwide ones; 4) bridge between academia / research centres and industry; 5) coordinate its goals with the EC and the main European players; 6) be a high-quality R&D conference; 7) be a well-recognised conference in Telecommunications; 8) provide a forum for the presentation of state-of-the-art technology, in both theoretical and experimental forms; 9) communicate the research results to the wide audience of the general public; 10) foster the participation of both established researchers and students, as well as industry members from various areas; 11) be a transparent and not-for-profit conference; 12) positively differentiate itself from other conferences, which will be achieved by reaching all previous objectives. With the extension, one more edition is organised, i.e., the 2022 one.

The SCREEN project brings the concept of cognitive radio to Space and exploits the benefits that this technology has already shown in the terrestrial domain. The project will look into analysing, developing, implementing and testing cognitive radio algorithms. The ground breaking element in SCREEN is however the implementation and testing. Even though some of the underlying technologies for the individual stages are not novel, the incorporation of all stages in a radio transceiver has never been done to the full extent of a cognitive, and not adaptive, system. The key enabling technology for cognitive radio is Software-Defined Radio (SDR), which provides the required flexibility to reconfigure the radio parameters autonomously and without any changes in the transceiver hardware. The Consortium will make use of proprietary SDR technology and use it for the implementation and testing. In fact, the project approach is to make use of terrestrial research results in cognitive radio at all levels (technological, market and regulatory) and capitalise the previous work done in different projects, avoiding unnecessary duplication of efforts. The target spectrum band for this project is S-band, which is underexplored and has a strong potential for future niche applications both in satcom and in ISLs for multi-satellite missions. It also brings advantages regarding regulatory concerns. This project clearly fits the topic, not only because its main goal is to evolve an innovative technology up to TRL4/5, but also because cognitive radio is a key enabling technology for the areas identified by the topic. This technology will lead to a new generation of satcom payloads and also have massive impact on ISLs and downlink subsystems. It also brings a terrestrial technology to space, together with new players, which has the possibility to dramatically improve the performance, efficiency and versatility of space communications.

Micro and Nanosatellites (often referred to as CubeSats) are revolutionizing the paradigm of engineering and space exploration in the last years, in several areas such as weather information and climatic research, multimedia communications, telephone and television, data distribution, transportation and logistics, navigation, safety, security, and rescue. The field of CubeSat is being pointed out as one of the emergent technological markets and it is expected to reach $6.35 billion by 2021, with a CAGR growth of 37.91% in the 2017-2021 period. With advances in CubeSat technologies, the energy demand in this market segment has also increased dramatically, requiring larger deployable solar arrays, lower power electronics, efficient energy storage systems and further energy transfer/harvesting systems. The WiPTherm project will design, implement and pilot an innovative Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) system, able to wirelessly recharge the energy storage components used in CubeSat technologies. The WiPTherm technology consists of a pioneering, clean, easy and cheap solution for energy transfer. The energy harvesting system comprises dozens of microarrays of 2D thermoelectric generators, resulting in a photo-thermoelectric plasmonic (HPTP) system that has the ability to convert photon energy into electrical energy (via thermal gradient). The wireless thermal stimulation will be performed through a large-range pulsed high power laser beam capable of operating at large distances.

Robots are active agents that need to interact with the physical world, to do so, robots are equipped with different sensors, whose data is used to build models that ultimately will allow robots to plan actions and make decisions. Currently, there is strong focus in developing deep learning strategies “data driven” to help solve this perception problem, even though these approaches work well in dataset and benchmark scenarios. There are still strong limitations in the use of this techniques in real world robot activities, specially due to the strong dynamics in robots operational environment, that is pushing the development of new tools and methods to make these approaches feasible in the real world. INESC TEC is strongly committed to become a centre of excellence with focus on field robotics, in particular, in the aerial and underwater robotics domain. In the last years, the centre for Robotics and Autonomous systems, of INESC TEC has advance its scientific knowledge in sensing and perception methods for robots navigation and localization in harsh operational environments. The key objective of INESC TEC is to become one of the European references in field robotics, and help to bring robot technology to solve real life problems where human intervention is still limited or non-existent. This proposal aims at creating solid knowledge and productive links in the global field of deep learning in field robotics between INESC TEC and established leading research European institutions, capable of enhancing the scientific and technological capacity of INESC TEC and linked institutions (as well as the capacity of partnering institutions involved in the twinning action), helping raising its staff’s research profile and its recognition as an European research centre of excellence in field robotics. In particular, it takes INESC TEC and places it as the pivot of a network of excellence, involving four international leaders in deep learning technology and fied robotics.