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As part of the ARM Institute’s COVID-19 focused project call, Siemens Corporation Corporate Technologies, Henderson Sewing Machine Corporation, Sewbo Inc, Bluewater Defense and Industrial Sewing and Innovation Center (ISAIC) collaborated on an robot that autonomously creates cloth face masks. | Source: ARM Institute

The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute released its technology project call. The ARM Institute’s project calls are an opportunity for projects that help bridge the gap between the push of technology and pull of the need of the robotics industry to receive funding. 

The ARM Institute is looking for submissions that respond to the specific needs of the manufacturing industry and the Department of Defense (DoD). 

For this project call, teams are able to request up to $1 million per project, with a minimum 1:1 cost share required for all submissions. The overall ARM budget for the project will be approximately $10 million. 

The project call’s topic areas have been expanded to include an increased focus on artificial intelligence (AI) for robotic manufacturing systems. 

ARM Institute’s latest project call also features a new two-step process. The first step of the process will involve submitting a concept paper. During the second phase, the teams behind selected concept papers will be invited to give a project presentation to the Institute’s panel of reviewers. 

Along with new topic areas, the ARM Institute’s project call includes a number of new Special Topic Areas, including: 

• Adaptive Real-Time Path Planning and Control: A solution that allows an advanced manufacturing robotic system to adjust a path or trajectory to variations that may occur in the system or process. 
• Human Action & Intention Prediction: A project that involves robots assisting humans efficiently to prevent mistakes and errors. 
• Robot Learning: Models or methods that allow robots to learn a manufacturing task from another robot or a human. 
• Feature and Post Recognition and Estimation: A system that gives robots contextual awareness of a manufacturing task, component, process or other activity within a facility. This system should allows robots to anticipate the next step in the process. 
• Virtual Commissioning of Advanced Robotic Systems: Systems that reduce the risk of commissioning new manufacturing robotic systems and accelerate the deployment of automation. These systems should avoid the need for testing at installation time, when defects in the system can be costly to resolve. 
• AI and Data for Advanced Manufacturing Robotic Systems: Benchmarks, test methods and metrics to evaluate the performance of manufacturing robotic systems that leverage AI algorithms and associated data. 
• Multi-Agent Motion Planning and Tasking for Discrete and Continuous Manufacturing Processes: Motion Planning that involves real-time robotic awareness of other robots and agents, provides cooperation motion and tasking and error recovery of one or more agents in a multi-agent setting. 
• Virtual Masking for Advanced Coating Applications: A project that eliminates or significantly reduces the need for the labor intensive advanced coating process in aerospace and on ground vehicles. 

To submit a concept paper, your organization must be an ARM member. Concept paper submissions will close on August 12, 2022. 

The ARM Institute announced eight new robotics technology projects in February 2022. At the time, it planned to award nearly $4 million in funding across the projects. The projects chosen address issues found by the DoD and commercial community to be the most urgent and important.