The Athena Research and Innovation Center (ARC) team is a research team with horizontal and multifaceted action for information processing and modeling. Its goals are to advance and sustain basic research in both theoretical and application problems with fundamentals lying at the intersection of various fields of applied sciences and technology such as robotics, informatics, communications, and cognitive systems. Emphasis is given on theoretical and algorithmic problems as well as novel multidisciplinary applications, including techniques of robot perception, robot interaction, signal processing, computer vision, speech communication, machine learning, nonlinear systems, stochastic systems, and cognitive modeling of information from humans and computers. A central goal of the ARC team in previous projects was also human-robot interaction.

In the context of the PILLAR-Robots project, the team develops visual and multimodal perception modules that will enable robots to have a fundamental understanding of their environment, a key ingredient for facilitating open-ended learning. These perception modules will be the backbone of the majority of WPs, a part of the PILLAR-Robots cognitive architecture, and support all the applications. Moreover, some of the perception modules will act as foundational building blocks for the more complex tasks of grounding purposes, building attention mechanisms to guide the robot’s attention, and constructing representations that are in line with the robot’s skills.