The total Horizon Europe funding for the project amounts to €15 million, of which more than €11 million is earmarked for the establishment of a new Center of Excellence (CoE). The Croatian government has also secured additional funding of €15 million from the European Regional Development Fund for investment in infrastructure and equipment and is also making an existing building available for the new CoE. UNIZG-FER is the coordinator of the project, and in addition to several other Croatian partners, two advanced partners are involved in teaming up with UNIZG-FER for setting up the new CoE: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the National Research Council (CNR) from Italy. LAMOR is one of the three UNIZG-FER laboratories that initiated the proposal for the MARBLE project and will be involved in its implementation. Prof. Petrović is Chairman of the Steering Committee of the MARBLE project and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of CoE MARBLE.

In HORACE, we will go beyond Euclidean distances between two points, and instead consider distances between other geometric objects and  account for manifolds that are not Euclidean. We will then exploit these distance measures in the form of kernel functions that can be used in Gaussian processes to account for variations and uncertainty. By leveraging our previous expertise, we will demonstrate the developed approaches in several human-robot collaboration scenarios involving joint physical collaboration, assembly, manipulation of deformable objects, all
with high degree of freedom robots, in particular, the TALOS humanoid. We will investigate how the control of a humanoid robot can be effectively achieved by using the proposed geometric descriptors and how the geodesics in such encoding can be used for effective planning.

HORACE will lead to novel methodological developments yielding more efficient human-robot collaboration and better understanding of its inherent geometrical structure. The three partners each bring knowledge and equipment that complement the others. Idiap brings knowledge on the geometric perspectives, UNIZG-FER on planning and HRC and JSI on humanoid robots and human-robot collaboration. The complementarity of the partners will enable concrete advancements in the field of human-robot collaboration.

In the DRUMS project, a learning platform, didactic guidelines and teaching materials for Vocational and Educational Trainings (VETs) and learning materials for their students will be created. The learning plattform, the didactic guidelines and the teaching and learning materials should provide approaches to further automate the manufacturing sector, make it more efficient and, above all, more sustainable. 

The teaching and learning materials will be developed on the following main topics:

• Manufacturing
• ICT technologies in manufacturing
• Robotics (industrial and collaborative)
• Artificial intelligence in robotics and manufacturing
• Sustainability