A five-year European Union (EU) project to develop a collaborative humanoid that helps workers in industrial environments has concluded, with the participants touting breakthroughs in “AI learning, natural language processing, and robotic manipulation.”

The SecondHands project, born from the EU’s €80 billion ($87 billion) Horizon 2020 research program, set out back in 2015 to develop what it called a “second pair of hands” for workers in factories, warehouses, and other industrial locations. The aim was to create a robotic assistant that is “proactive” in helping technicians lift or carry objects, acting as an apprentice-like helper that carries out the less-skilled facets of a job. The project was developed under the auspices of a consortium of researchers and computer scientists from a number of organizations, including Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL); Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT); Sapienza, University of Rome; University College London (UCL); and Ocado Technology, the technology division of the U.K.’s online-only grocery giant Ocado.

The culmination of the program was a robot called ARMAR-6, which was developed at KIT in Germany to advance research into human-robot interaction in a structured, supervised environment.

Collaboration

Over the past couple of years, ARMAR-6 has been tested at Ocado’s automated customer fulfillment centers in the U.K. to perform maintenance on its conveyor belt system — essentially trialing the use of robots to help fix other robots. The idea is that a maintenance technician could be at the top of a ladder with a tool in their hand, and as they stretch their arm out to place the tool down, the robot would observe their action and take it from them.

Moreover, ARMAR-6 was designed to learn and adapt to real-world situations, such as grasping an object when someone wants to move it from one location to another.

ARMAR-6 sports a range of sensors and cameras, along with a telescopic torso and rotatable arms, hands, and fingers that can grasp. Crucially, it can interact with its environment using just visual data, detecting where humans are and estimating their posture purely from real-time images.

A major part of the project was also showcasing how ARMAR-6 could avoid collisions in a fast-moving industrial environment, where static and dynamic obstacles — including humans — are common.

Among other notable developments from the project is the creation of a speech interface based entirely on neural models, including all-neural speech synthesis and all-neural speech recognition. Such breakthroughs, according to KIT’s Dr. Sebastian Stüker, will lead to “better acceptance of ‘cobots’ by humans” and facilitate a more natural interaction between humans and robots.

Transition

SecondHands’ broader goal was to help transition humanoid assistants from research labs to industry settings, with Ocado the first stepping stone on that journey. With the project now officially concluded, plans are in place to apply findings to other sectors and use cases, including autonomous vehicles and the oil and gas industry.

Ocado won’t be deploying ARMAR-6 at is fulfillment centers, which suggests it’s not quite ready for a commercial environment. But various undisclosed ARMAR-6 projects are underway in other industries, so it could help accelerate the use of humanoid assistants in the real world.

“The results of this project have shown categorically how robots can amplify the benefits of human expertise,” said Graham Deacon, robotics research fellow at Ocado Technology. “We’ll continue to build on these learnings, looking forward to a future when we can use these breakthroughs to apply them in a real-world setting.”

This project also highlights the need for academia and industry to work in tandem. There’s no point developing AI-infused robots in a laboratory setting if they fail at the first hurdle in the real world.

The timing of SecondHands’ conclusion is also notable, as countries are embracing more automation due to social-distancing measures enforced by the COVID-19 crisis. In the future, the technologies that underpin ARMAR-6 could be redeployed in other environments, such as “helping to reduce contamination, or in assisted living,” according to Deacon.

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The new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, committed to introducing a new European regulation for artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe during her first 100 days in office. While a fully fledged regulation is unlikely in that timeframe, we can expect to see a vision for a new regulatory framework for AI in Europe very soon, possibly this month.

What can we expect from such a regulation and what should AI developers and businesses be doing to prepare for it?

The EU is positioning itself as a leader in trustworthy, human-centric artificial intelligence. The European Commission set out its vision for AI, which supports “ethical, secure and cutting-edge AI made in Europe”.

Three pillars underpin the Commission’s vision: increasing public and private investments in AI to boost its uptake; preparing for socio-economic changes; and ensuring an appropriate ethical and legal framework to strengthen European values.

Trustworthy AI

To implement this vision, the Commission established the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (HLEG-AI), which published its Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI in April 2019. These guidelines have received considerable international attention and are widely regarded as the most comprehensive framework for ethical and trustworthy AI in the world.

Trustworthiness is a prerequisite for people and societies to develop, deploy and use AI systems. If AI systems – and the human beings behind them – are not demonstrably worthy of trust, the uptake of AI will be hindered.

Why would this matter? AI offers vast social and economic benefits in health, in education, in transport and in sustainable development. Trust is key. Like many other settings, such as trust in aviation technologies, nuclear power or food safety, it is not simply the components of the AI system but the system in its overall context that may or may not inspire trust.

Lawful, ethical, robust

In its work, the European Commission’s HLEG-AI, building upon the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, defined ‘trustworthy AI’ applications along three axes: they must be lawful, ethical and robust. To make the concept more practical, the HLEG-AI translated these three components into a set of requirements that AI systems must satisfy in order to be considered trustworthy.

Trustworthy AI systems must: protect human agency and ensure human oversight of their operation and impact; be technically and environmentally robust and safe to use; respect individual privacy and be based on good governance; ensure they are non-discriminatory and fair; protect societal and environmental wellbeing; and be transparent and accountable.

The operationalisation of trustworthy AI in practice is defined through an assessment list that the HLEG-AI has developed and is currently refining based on broad public consultation across Europe, as well as deep-dive interviews with representative stakeholder organisations.

We can expect that the upcoming regulatory context for artificial intelligence in the EU will be closely aligned with the principles of trustworthy AI, although it is important to note that the HLEG-AI has no role in drafting such regulation.

Facial recognition

There is a growing sense that rather than introducing a generic AI regulation, there will be a more nuanced risk-based approach, possibly one that is application and technology-specific. Some of the high-risk domains that generate a significant amount of debate include healthcare, judicial decision-making, and mass citizen surveillance.

For example, facial recognition raises issues such as a person’s right to privacy, the gathering of personal data without consent and the potential for discrimination. We are likely to see restrictions on the use of facial recognition, possibly even a ban for some period of time in specific settings.

Some of the technology-specific issues relate to how we can ensure that, for example, data-driven AI systems are trained and rigorously evaluated in order to be confident that they are free of harmful bias.

Irish opportunity

Ireland has a great opportunity to become a leader in trustworthy AI. Ireland is the European home to many of the world’s leading companies in data, AI and technology. There is significant national strength in the commercial, academic and civil society spheres. Trustworthy AI will become a commercial imperative.

Even if a new European AI regulatory framework was not to materialise, consumers are becoming highly sensitive to personal data privacy, the impact of technology on the integrity of democracy, and the influence of personalisation and targeting on individual autonomy. Trustworthy AI will become the de-facto standard for AI-based technologies to be accepted by consumers.

We can, and should, take a leadership role here. Ireland has an excellent reputation in artificial intelligence and we have the opportunity to make Ireland a beacon of best practice in trustworthy AI.

Businesses in Ireland can lead by stepping up and grasping this opportunity by developing protocols, tools and services to support the auditability and transparency of the AI systems they build and deploy.

Ireland is a country that is respected and trusted throughout the world because of our reputation in areas such as safe food production, our environment, our tradition of international peace-keeping and diplomacy, as well as our achievements in arts and culture. We should establish a world-leading reputation for trustworthy AI. We have the ingredients, the expertise and the ecosystem to make it happen.

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