Vicomtech, part of the four Spanish entities that make up the European Network of Excellence "dAIEDGE" for AI technologies

Vicomtech is part of the consortium of 36 partners that make up the European Network of Excellence, which under the name of "dAIEDGE", is a project called to revolutionize the development and market adoption of distributed Artificial Intelligence solutions in Europe, of which four Spanish entities are part. This network aims to create a reference project within international AI initiatives and to promote the application of AI in peripheral computing platforms.

It is expected that dAIEDGE applications will be used in a wide variety of fields, as the main goal is to support and ensure the rapid development and market adoption of distributed state-of-the-art AI technologies, such as hardware, software, frameworks and tools. Artificial Intelligence applied to edge technology (Edge AI) represents, for example, a pathway and accelerator for many new applications in fields such as autonomous driving, personalized digital assistance and intelligent service robots.

Under the leadership of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI, experts in artificial intelligence, embedded computing, microprocessors, distributed hardware and software, computer science and engineering will collaborate closely to, on the one hand, mobilize the AI and Edge community and initiate European partnerships and projects; and on the other hand, to be able to connect on-demand platforms, digital innovation centers and AI and Edge projects with stakeholders. "The development of intelligent edge devices dramatically increases their ability to make complex decisions and respond to real-time data. This is the basis for a dynamic AI ecosystem with distributed, reliable, efficient and scalable AI methods," says Professor Didier Stricker, director of the consortium-leading Augmented Vision research lab at DFKI Kaiserslautern.

At the national level, the dAIEDGE project involves the International Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Foundation (IOT-DIH), the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), the University of Salamanca (USAL), and the Visual Interaction and Communication Technologies Center, Vicomtech (VICOM).

Thus, each partner of the consortium is specialized in different fields of Artificial Intelligence and will be able to focus on one or several specific use cases within the framework of the dAIEDGE project, which may foster the European AI community and the promotion of joint partnerships and projects.

Vicomtech applies its Artificial Intelligence expertise in two specific use cases, Warehouse and Space. The first, Warehouse, focuses on three of the main challenges of warehouse management: inventories, product layout, and order accuracy and picking. The tedious tasks of order picking in warehouses involve a great deal of human effort and cause workers to become tired and lose concentration. Vicomtech will realize HRC order picking in a warehouse scenario on the dAIEdge framework. Specifically, the goal is to develop edge AI devices integrated with autonomous mobile robots (AMR), which are suitable for optimizing robot control in order picking and avoiding human risks with the lowest latency in decision making.

The second use case, Space, focuses on efficient processing of sea ice classification aboard a satellite. Images are pre-processed at the edge (on board the satellite) in order to efficiently transmit only relevant and time-critical information to stakeholders/responsible parties on Earth. Vicomtech is involved in the implementation and deployment of AI models for edge inference and the exploration of strategies for continuous and efficient edge learning.