Research activities should be multi-disciplinary and address all of the following areas:

• Development of robust, easy to use, explainable and compliant AI tools for manufacturing environments that require minimal learning and can be configured without highly skilled personnel;
• Implement and integrate the latest research findings on technologies such as sensors, actuators, control, edge computing, haptic technologies, mechatronics, robotics and autonomous systems to enhance collaborative robotics systems in order to develop advanced smart manufacturing human-machine collaborative systems ensuring safe physical and social interactions and efficient collaboration with human workers;
• Demonstrate complex, safe and efficient collaboration between multiple agents simultaneously, e.g. humans, autonomous agents, industrial machinery, AGVs and collaborative robots;
• SSH should provide a variety of human-centric approaches to develop smooth collaboration in the human-machine teams; to improve user experience; and increase awareness comfort, trust, skill and safety (physical and social) of workers in highly automated industrial environments by incorporating a greater understanding of linguistic, historic, and cultural concerns of end-users and workers , while taking into consideration a gender and intersectional perspective;
• Demonstrate results in at least three large-scale industrial use-cases, targeting sectors and tasks typically difficult to automate.

Ιnternational cooperation is encouraged, in particular with Japan and/or South Korea in view of the long cooperation with EU on AI, robotics and manufacturing. This topic implements jointly the co-programmed European Partnerships Made in Europe and AI, Data and Robotics.