Following the FSTP-2 Call closing, on 30 November, Eurobench has been carefully studying the 53 proposals submitted by entities from 13 different European countries. In the end, a total of 42 projects have been selected to move on to the Grant Agreement Preparation phase. This phase involves formalising the terms of collaboration between EUROBENCH and each project selected in this second call. Once this agreement is formalised, the project will be officially approved for funding.
This 2nd call was launched to identify and fund projects that need to test and benchmark their bipedal robotics technologies on the facilities and unified software that EUROBENCH is creating with the help of the 17 teams that were selected in FSTP-1. This will be the first benchmarking framework for bipedal robotics in Europe and, by mid-spring 2021, it will be ready for the projects selected in FSTP-2 to start testing.
The 79% of the submitted projects have been approved to receive funding to test their prototypes in the Eurobench facilities: of the 42 approved projects, 30 work with exoskeletons, 2 with prostheses and 10 with humanoids.
In terms of testing and benchmarking objectives, of the 42 approved projects:
- 27 aim to assess the performance of a real robotic system or control algorithm in one of the two EUROBENCH facilities (the one dedicated to humanoids in Genoa or the one dedicated to Wearable Robots in Madrid)
- 14 aim to assess the performance of a real robotic system using the EUROBENCH unified software to make remote experiments.
- 1 aims to assess the performance of the robotic system and/or to produce high-quality performance reference data from individuals using the EUROBENCH software to process retrospective data on robot and/or humans. All the collected and processed data should be uploaded and integrated in the EUROBENCH Database.