EU-backed EMERGE project concludes with collective awareness in artificial systems

The four-year, EU-backed EIC Pathfinder project EMERGE has concluded by developing collective awareness in artificial systems, leading to new robotic systems, more sustainable artificial intelligence architectures, and startup projects.

Project Objective and Scope

The EMERGE project has completed its four-year effort to examine how artificial systems understand their environments, act autonomously, and interact with humans in dynamic, uncertain, and socially complex environments.

In the project, which involved researchers from the University of Pisa, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Delft University of Technology, University of Bristol, and Da Vinci Labs, the concept of collective awareness was developed, enabling artificial intelligence agents to interact with local information to form a shared existence and goal representation.

Dimensions of Awareness and New Architectural Approaches

The project adopted an operational definition by drawing distinctions between awareness and consciousness, and investigated spatial, temporal, self, and metacognitive dimensions of awareness in robotic systems.

The work paved the way for decentralized, energy-efficient artificial intelligence architectures that operate with less data, while supporting the creation of startups such as Embodied AI, ContinualIST, Collective Robotics, and Phoebe. It also laid the foundation for follow-up projects such as SWIFT-BUILD, HE MINGLE, and ADA-COLLAB.