Proposals should:

• Improve the physical performance of robots (for example: improving robustness and resilience – to handle environment variations and unknown or unexpected situations – and energy efficiency to run safely and autonomously for longer periods of time, increased speed, some operating under extreme physical conditions such as under water, rough terrain, difficult climatic conditions, in the body, in the air, etc.).
• Develop promising and innovative robotic concepts (e.g.: collaborative, modular and distributed, hyper redundant, highly reconfigurable, soft or miniaturised robotics) enabling adaptation to transformations of industry and society (including crisis), and in addition to examine design methods and tools for novel configurations and concepts.

Proposals should investigate novel scientific approaches or push the limit of existing ones to improve physical capabilities of robots relevant to industry and service needs in sectors where this is a barrier to uptake, such as innovative actuation principles (such as soft robotics, reconfigurable, hyper-redundant, modular robotics), or advance the field of miniaturised robotics, advanced control, improved hardware and increased trustworthiness and dependability (e.g. building on the latest results in mechatronics, advanced sensing and actuation, advanced materials, integrated and embedded systems for AI at the edge, neuromorphic computing).

The shape and size of robots can vary from miniature to large-scale, from soft, to more rigid structure, from manipulators, to ground, air, marine, in-vivo, exoskeletons and wearable robots, etc. Such proposals could also propose innovative approaches in building on and integrating the latest developments in key underlying technologies, or by exploiting multimodalities (audio, vision, AR/VR, haptics, etc.), improved safety mechanisms, physical collaboration, collaborative and swarm robotics. In addition, proposals can address energy efficiency, to address the current limitation of energy autonomy in robotics.