INTRO - Intelligent Interface Design

The INTRO project - elaborated in close cooperation between universities and industry - will offer 10 young researchers (8 Early Stage Researchers and 2 Experienced Researchers) a unique training program to assist their career development in the interdisciplinary areas of Interactive Robotics: Cooperative Robot Learning; Cognitive Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Intelligent Interface Design.

INTRO's overall objective is to contribute to create a new generation of researchers with a broad understanding of the research and technologies needed to build intelligent robots that function in close interaction with humans in unstructured, changing "real word" conditions. The research will develop the necessary foundations to expand robots into new markets by creating novel systems with cognitive and multi-modal interaction abilities. A strong multidisciplinary approach will complement specialized domain knowledge to enhance career prospects for the ESRs/ERs The industrial participation will endow the trainees with good insight into product life-cycle and provide unique training and valuable hands-on experience in top-level robotics development.

There are four major components to the training program:

in the Research program, each researcher will engage in an individual research project in close cooperation with well established researchers from the partner institutes;
in addition, the research will be transferred to an operational platform in industry;
a joint training program will facilitate strong theoretical training. This includes a series of seminars and network-wide workshops;
each ESR will also undergo a Secondment and have short visits to other partners.

Other Network training activities will further strengthen the training program together with courses and activities providing complementary skills such as participation in project management, organization of workshops, presentation of research results, and courses in communication techniques, proposal writing , IPR etc.