Engineering, manufacturing and construction

By studying the interaction between touch stimuli and neural processing to improve robotic prosthetics, EU-funded projects such as NEBIAS and NANOBIOTOUCH, are also shedding light on how the whole brain functions.

A real cat can’t be both alive and dead at the same time, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger said. But quantum physics rewrites the rules, a fact now demonstrated by a team of researchers funded by the EU.

With competition for the use of forest resources ever increasing, the EU-funded project DIABOLO sets out to track disturbances and degradation more effectively.

Thinner, faster, stronger, more flexible – graphene has the potential to bring a new dimension to technologies in fields as varied as fashion, medicine and transport. EU funding is making sure Europe stays at the heart of the new developments.

With a patent already filed and the project barely halfway through, the EU funded CARBAZYMES has identified promising biocatalyst enzymes with the potential to transform industrial chemical processes, benefiting industry, consumers and the environment.

When creating structures capable of withstanding earthquakes, engineers currently rely on force-based methods only. They cannot decide how the structure will adapt to seismic vibrations, which can in turn lead to undesirable failures. An innovative design for a highly deformable reinforced concrete structure is hoped to bring such freedom, whilst optimising the use of resources, minimising costs and ensuring safety.

Whilst the extraction of shale gas in a safe and responsible way is an EU priority, an extraction method easing public concerns has yet to found. Hydraulic fracturing - commonly known as ‘fracking'' - not only fails to fit the bill, it is also known to trigger earthquakes. A UK-based company is putting forward a promising alternative in the EU-funded OCTOPUS TECHNOLOGY project.

Many EU-funded projects are working towards advancing robotics to assist people with overcoming societal challenges, such as providing care for the elderly or providing disaster relief. An academic who worked on one such project has now argued that author Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics are not the moral guidelines that they appear and should be updated.

A Polish/Czech research team has demonstrated how even a seemingly ultrasecure form of money, designed using quantum mechanics can have a potentially important security loophole putting it at risk of forgery. But this highlights not the shortcomings of this exciting new technology, but rather its continuing potential to transform human society in the 21st century.

Utility field work can be a real headache even with precise maps at hand. Admitting that they rapidly manage to locate the sought network, workers may end up damaging grids belonging to someone else. This type of scenario will soon be avoidable thanks to an assistive device developed under the LARA project.

MOTIT — an electric scooter renting service made available by means of a dedicated app — has come a long way since its launch in Barcelona in 2013. The system is will soon be available in Milan and is being tested in Paris. But this growth didn’t come without improvements. Complaints from users having difficulties in locating their scooters have led to the conception of a Galileo receiver and its integration into MOTIT scooters as part of the G MOTIT project.

Efficiently accessing a wider range of laser spectral regions is a must for the photonics industry. A miniature frequency tripler developed under the MINIMODS project promises to bring conversion efficiencies from 10 to above 30 %.

An innovative dry etching method developed by EU-funded researchers could reduce the cost of manufacturing solar cells by up to 25 %.

Fear of losing our jobs to those who can perform tasks faster, cheaper and perhaps with more creativity, has been longstanding. Equally, the introduction of a new leisure class with more free-time to spend once liberated from mundane, repetitive and boring tasks has also long been promised. With some forecasts indicating that within 20 years, 35 % of UK jobs are at risk from automation, it might be time to sort the job terminators out from the tumble dryers.

To this day, the true potential of the ‘all-connected’ world has been hindered by the very thing that is supposed to power it: battery technology. A material capable of turning sunlight, heat and movement into energy could soon shake things up.

Launched by Shell at Cobham services on the M25 motorway, the new station was supplied by ATM as part of the EU funded HYFIVE project. It’s the first of three hydrogen stations to be opened by Shell in the UK in 2017.

A new machine called the Watly offers solutions to three of society’s most important challenges – ensuring access to clean water, sustainable energy generation and reaping the benefits of the evolving digital revolution. Supported by funds from the Horizon 2020 project, the innovative SME behind the project is now nearly ready to unveil its first full-scale Watly machine.

EU-funding under the ALTEREGO project has helped researchers develop a ‘mirror game’ using artificial intelligence that could provide an affordable, non-invasive way to diagnose and monitor schizophrenia.

Part-supported through the EU-funded SOMA project, robotics researchers have developed versatile robotic grippers to pick thousands of supermarket items.

Part-supported through the EU-funded LUMINOUS project, neuroscientists have developed a revolutionary brain-computer interface with those in complete locked-in state (CLIS).

New research part-supported by the EU-funded IQIT project has produced the first-ever industrial blueprint for a large-scale quantum computer that could lead to an entirely new and exciting technological revolution.

The EU funded POLYACT project applied textile fabrication principles to the production of microactuators, offering a range of biomedical applications both inside and outside the body.

The EU-funded MINTWELD project has made a novel breakthrough in understanding how solidification cracking occurs during the welding of steel, a problem that can lead to structural failure if left undetected and is thus a key challenge for industry and the construction sector.

In the race for a smart everything, houses seem to be gathering more attention every year. Voice control is one of the features that high-tech companies are willing to invest in and - while technological solutions are still in their early stages - an EU-funded project is looking to blow their mind by going a step further: voice control spiced up with automated speech recognition.

It has been said that spending too much time on a smartphone can negatively impact brain development or even cause damage to the neck. But don’t toss yours in the bin just yet. An EU-funded project is working on smartphones’ health cred by developing ‘Sniffphone’ - a module capable of analysing the user’s breath to detect as many as 17 diseases.