News

👏 The R1 robot is guiding visitors at Palazzo Madama in Turin<./p>

Trials are on-going at Palazzo Madama in Turin, where we demonstrate the robotic tour guide use case to visitors.

Tests are meant to evaluate the CONVINCE technology through performance indicators and user feedback.

👏 Another integration week and plenary meeting in Genova!

To conclude the second development phase of the project, we met for another technical integration session and plenary meeting.

🛠️ It was a fruitful hands-on effort to bring latest advancement in planning, situation awareness and verification into our use cases. 📒 In the last two days we shared what was achieved in the integration week, discuss latest results and plan the final phase of the project.

👏 Another integration week and plenary meeting in Genova!

To conclude the second development phase of the project, we met for another technical integration session and plenary meeting.

🚀Our first hands-on CONVINCE toolbox workshop at the ROSCon DR & DE 2025. Participants explored Convince Project tools together in a single session, providing an overview of how the tools collectively support robust and adaptive robotic behaviour.

Guided by the tool creators, participants tested 4 key components of the toolbox 🧰: ✔️ Design-time Verification 🤖 Semantic Anchoring 🛡️ Run-time Monitoring 🧭 Planning Mitigation Strategies

🙏 Feedback from participants will be invaluable and guide future improvements to the tools, learning materials, and overall user experience.

👏 A big week for the CONVINCE project in Birmingham!

We just wrapped up an intense but productive few days at the University of Birmingham, where the project partners came together for a hands-on technical integration session and plenary meeting.

🛠️ The first half of the week was all about bringing our tools developed across planning, verification and situation learning closer to real-world use cases. It was a hands-on effort with new features added, tested and refined. 📒 The last two days gave us space to reflect and plan, sharing progress and aligning tasks as we move toward the final phase of the project.

Thanks to everyone who joined and contributed. It's always wonderful to come together in person and be reminded of what we're building together.

Results of CONVINCE were presented at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Atlanta.

📌 Workshop on Robotics Software Architecturest: Michaela Klauck gave an invited talk and we presented two papers focussing on CONVINCE tooling for design-time and run-time verification of robot software.

📌 W. Zhang, C. Street and M. Masoumeh, presented the paper Multi-Nonholonomic Robot Object Transportation with Obstacle Crossing using a Deformable Sheet.

Lorenzo Natale Michaela Klauck Christian Henkel represented CONVINCE at the European Robotics Forum in Stuttgart.

CONVINCE participated in the organization of the following two workshops, taking the opportunity to present the project recent work towards robust and verifiable robot behaviors:

📌 Mobile Manipulation of Rigid and Deformable Objects: Community Challenges and Opportunities

📌 Advancing AI-Powered Robotic Cognition, Deliberation, and Learning for Real-World

🌟We had our second review meeting! 🌟

A huge thank you to our reviewers Marc Hanheide and Malik Ghallab for their constructive feedback and engaging discussions, a special thanks also goes to Eren Gultekin and Olivier Da Costa.

We look forward to the next year of milestones, events and development!

🌟 Congratulations to Charlie Street for winning the Best Paper Award at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Unified Representation for Robotic Application Development (UR-RAD)! 🏆 The paper, "Towards a Verifiable Toolchain for Robotics," describe our model-driven approach, each of the toolchain components, and how they interact. We also discuss survey results which demonstrate the demand for a verifiable toolchain among the robotics community

Members of CONVINCE co-organized the Hands-On wirh ROS2 Deliberation Technologies during ROSCon 2024. The workshop offered hands-on exploration of task planning and behavior modeling within ROS 2. The schedule included introductory presentations, hands-on implementation sessions moderated by maintainers of the technologies - BehaviorTree.CPP, FlexBE, SkiROS2, and the CONVINCE toolchain - and interactive discussions.

The workshop was a big success, with more than 100 participants! This is part of the activitis of the ROS Deliberation Community Group.

🚀 Last week at AISoLA 2024, Marco Lampacrescia from Bosch Research presented SMC Storm, a new Statistical Model Checking tool developed under the CONVINCE Project, based on the renowned Probabilistic Model Checker, Storm.

SMC Storm is available open source as part of the CONVINCE toolchain release

Technical partners gathered in Genova for an integration meeting. Across three days, team members worked together to align our use cases and tools, working to ensure a seamless integration of the project's components.

The sessions were productive and invaluable in pushing the project forward. We successfully tested our modelling language on examples derived from our use cases and ran model-checking tools to verify related properties. Significant progress was also made in integrating situation understanding and run-time monitors.

Charlie Street, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working in WP3.

This time we would like to feature Razane Azrou, who is Research Engineer at CEA, working in WP2.

Meet the developer

This time we would like to feature Masoumeh Mansoori, an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, and a team leader for the project's work package Task and Motion planning.

Members of the CONVINCE consortium contributed to the ACM SIGSOFT Summer School for Software Engineering in Robotics that was held in Bruxelles June 4-8 2024. Enrico Ghiorzi (University of Genova) gave a lecture on Behavior Trees and tooling, while Ralph Lange and Michaela Klauck (BOSCH) organized a full day on Verification and Validation of autonomous robots.

The inaugural "Meet the Developer" article takes you behind the scenes to shine a spotlight on the individuals driving Convince. We're excited to begin with Michaela Klauck, Research Engineer at Bosch Corporate Research.

In this newsletter, you will find a project update, survey news, information about ERF 2024, as well as details of upcoming events and publications.

👏 First round of trials with the R1 robot at Palazzo Madama in Turin<./p>

We performed the first validation session for the Robotic Museum Guide use case.

We gathered lots of logs and ros bags for debugging, as well as performance indicators and user feedback. This material will be used to improve the technology in the second development iteration phase of the project.

CONVINCE joined forces with the project to SestoSenso to organize the workshop and insight session on Safe Adaptatio for Long-Term Autonomy and Human-Robot Interaction.

We were in Rimini to attend the 2024 European Forum. This time we brought also the R1 robot to demonstrate its capabilities, together with a poster to present CONVINCE aims, challenges and methodology.

The Consortium met in Renningen for the first review of the project. We had fruitful discussion with the project officer and the reviewers and invaluable insights. Looking fotward to the next year of activities!

We just had an exciting project meeting in Paris, hosted by CEA.

We discussed project progress and planned the next steps in view of the first periodic report of CONVINCE. We also had a chance to visit CEA showroom and robotics laboratories, quite impressive!

We propose a new ROS Working Group, whose main goal shall be to develop common architectural concepts and framework mechanisms so that the various methods can be combined more easily. 

CONVINCE project kicked off to improve the autonomy of robots. Coordinated by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), the project has been awarded over €4 million in EU funding under the Horizon Europe Programme. Complete press release.

The news was featured on the leading Italian press agency ANSA.

IIT

CONVINCE is attending the 2023 European Robotics Forum at Odense, Denmark.

CONVINCE project had its kick-off meerting in October 2022, which was held in Genova, Italy.