The robots of tomorrow will be endowed with the ability to adapt to drastic and unpredicted changes in their environment including humans. Such adaptations can however not be boundless: the robot must stay trustworthy, i.e. the adaptations should not be just a recovery into a degraded functionality. Instead, it must be a true adaptation, meaning that the robot will change its behavior while maintaining or even increasing its expected performance, and stays at least as safe and robust as before.
RoboSAPIENS will focus on autonomous robotic software adaptations and will lay the foundations for ensuring that such software adaptations are carried out in an intrinsically safe, trustworthy and efficient manner, thereby reconciling open-ended self-adaptation with safety by design. RoboSAPIENS will also transform these foundations into 'first time right'-design tools and robotic platforms, and will validate and demonstrate them up to TRL4.
