The participants from this university belong to the GII and the LIDIA groups at the CITIC research center of the University of A Coruña (UDC) in Spain. The team involved in this project has mainly focused during the last twenty years on the different problems of Cognitive and Intelligent robotics, as well as on the applications of Machine Learning, from a multidisciplinary point of view. The group also has the capacity to build robots and adapt them, designing both the morphology and the control and cognition.

The Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR) is a highly interdisciplinary institute, featuring integration among laboratories and research topics spanning from cognitive sciences and neuroscience to cognitive robotics, autonomous robotics and machine learning. Within PILLAR-Robots, ISTC-CNR will provide an international-level expertise on learning and motivational processes.

Sorbonne University is a multidisciplinary and research-intensive university structured in three faculties: humanities, medicine and science. The Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) is Sorbonne University robotics lab. Research at ISIR covers most robotics topics from the mechanical design to control, signal processing and cognitive abilities and are organised around two axes: autonomy and interaction with humans through multimodal channels.

The Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies was founded in 2001 and is based in Athens. The Robotics Unit is a research unit which performs research on multimodal Robot Perception & Interaction, at the intersection of robotics, computer vision & speech, and machine/deep learning. It has developed technologies in Robotics and AI, as well as efficient autonomous systems to support HRI and collaboration for edutainment and healthcare.

AI2Life Srl, an ISTC-CNR spinoff company, aims to support digital transformation, industrial stakeholders’ competitiveness, and societal and environmental well-being by designing, prototyping, engineering, producing, and commercializing ground-breaking Human-centered Artificial Intelligence solutions. In the PILLAR-Robots project, AI2Life will lead the development of specialized applications of purposeful robots operating in fruits and vegetables post-harvesting activities.

Since 2004, PAL Robotics has developed state-of-the-art service robots specially designed to solve customers’ needs. We design and manufacture highly integrated and reliable solutions for research institutions and service industries worldwide, and have been involved in numerous projects in the public and private sector, including more than 25 EU-funded projects. Within PILLAR-Robots, PAL Robotics’ main role is validation and testing of software and hardware.