Projects
Collaborative and individual projects across higher-education ICT development, human-robot interaction, AI & robotics infrastructure, and digital twin tooling for urban planning.
Updating the curriculum and developing curricula, ensuring teaching ability and supporting academic staff, reducing student dropouts and increasing the number of motivated student candidates.
The challenge in modern industry is to find the best ways for human-robot interaction in workplaces, enabling robots to realize optimal solutions by combining AI and human capabilities. The project's goal is to contribute to the automation of company production processes, focusing on the social and psychological aspects of human-robot collaboration to ensure that human workers in the industry feel safe and satisfied. Research directions include creating a collaborative robotics experimental lab, designing robotized workplaces, and modelling of human-robot interaction, assessments and analysis of influencing factors and risks. Expected results are methodologies and validated human-robot interaction models, skills for their implementation, impact factors and risk assessments, a developed laboratory with hardware, software and expertise; providing user-centred design solutions services. All of this leads to safer human-robot interactions, increasing user trust in robotic systems.
The AI and Robotics Estonia (AIRE) EDIH has successfully commenced its operations during the 2022–2025 period, supporting the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics in Estonian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This initiative has triggered €62 million in additional investments and executed 54 test-before-invest pilots, primarily within the manufacturing sector. AIRE's goal for the next period (2025–2028) is to further accelerate the deployment of AI solutions, helping at least 250 unique clients (half of whom will use EU AI infrastructure services) to attract €100 million in extra investments, thereby also enhancing the digital maturity of Estonian SMEs. AIRE's services, which include training, investment support, and cross-border collaboration, are directly aimed at boosting the EU's competitiveness, backing Estonia's national AI strategy, and assisting SMEs in achieving the EU Digital Decade 2030 objectives.
This project was challenged by the knowledge that the city of Tallinn faces challenges in managing distributed city data, which is why there is no single, real-time 3D platform. This leads to inaccuracies, synchronous updates and resource-intensive data management issues. Unsynchronized data sources hinder effective decisions and the lack of an integrated tool complicates city development. The Digital Twin project addresses this gap by developing an intelligent digital twin toolkit that allows urban planners, officials and decision-makers to interact with the city's digital twin through intuitive, role-based workflows, enabling better planning, monitoring and forecasting. The long-term goal is to provide a commercially viable planning interface for smart cities-[cities - an intelligent toolkit that transforms distributed data into coordinated and actionable knowledge.