EXCEED-AIR: EXCellence Initiative for European Empowerment and Development in AI-Driven Robotics

Project activities

The EXCEED-AIR project encompasses four primary planned activities, designed to operate synergistically:

Institutional Reform and Capacity Building: The project implements a structured audit of current governance, research assessment practices, and career frameworks. It establishes transparent progression models and assessment methodologies aligned with the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). These reforms embed transparent decision-making and reward open science practices to sustain institutional excellence.

Skills and Talent Development: A dedicated Learning Hub delivers a comprehensive training programme encompassing machine learning for robotics, human-robot interaction safety, and data stewardship. This is complemented by a staff exchange and mobility programme to facilitate bilateral and multilateral knowledge transfer across partner institutions.

Digital Infrastructure and Virtual Joint Lab: The project federates the equipment, testbeds, and simulation resources of partner institutions into a unified Virtual Joint Lab. This infrastructure integrates digital-twin environments, secure data-sharing frameworks, and AI-powered collaboration platforms compliant with FAIR data principles and the General Data Protection Regulation. This setup supports reproducible workflows and multi-site experimentation.

Collaborative Research and Innovation Activities: Guided by a co-created Joint Research and Innovation Agenda, the consortium executes a series of cross-border seed projects. Initial research targets four strategic domains including robust perception, unstructured environment learning, human-aware decision-making, and multi-agent systems. These foundational projects then inform applied research in healthcare, smart manufacturing, and marine environmental monitoring, culminating in integrative system-level demonstrators.

Impacts

The EXCEED-AIR project is designed to generate measurable, long-term impacts across multiple sectors by translating European policy and technological priorities into sustainable practice. The initiative targets distinct outcomes for academic institutions, industry, public authorities, and the general public.

Institutional Modernisation and Research Excellence The project drives structural reform within participating research institutions by establishing transparent, merit-based career pathways and integrating open science practices into standard assessment frameworks. This capacity building is supported by the deployment of shared digital infrastructure and federated testing environments, which elevate the digital readiness of partner laboratories and promote cross-border scientific collaboration.

Industrial Innovation and Adoption By focusing on high-demand sectors such as smart manufacturing, assistive healthcare, and marine monitoring, the project actively engages small and medium enterprises in co-creation activities. Providing industry partners with access to validated digital twin models, open-source algorithms, and clear intellectual property frameworks lowers the barriers to adopting trustworthy AI-driven robotics.

Policy Development and Standardisation The project converts its scientific findings into actionable policy briefs for regional and European decision-makers. These outputs offer public authorities and procurement agencies evidence-based guidance on specifying and regulating safe, human-centric robotic systems in compliance with emerging frameworks like the EU AI Act.

Societal Trust and Citizen Engagement To address public concerns regarding artificial intelligence and automation, the initiative incorporates citizen robotics laboratories and community workshops. These hands-on demonstrations demystify human-robot interaction, gather direct user feedback, and foster societal acceptance by prioritising safety, transparency, and human oversight in robotic applications

TUM team members

• Sandra Hirche
• Satoshi Endo
• Stefan Sosnowski
• Nicholas Kantor Nagel
• Hatem Sultan