European cities and communities are globally hailed as attractive places to live, and European architects are sought out to assist in the current global wave of urbanisation. Adding digital to this tradition place EU companies in a strong position at home and globally to solve many of the transitional challenges ahead.

The contribution of CitCom.ai is to build a lasting facility in support of the EU’s global position in cities and communities. Expanding the existing infrastructure and expertise throughout the Union, CitCom.ai will provide real-life conditions for Testing and Experimentation Facilities (TEF), relevant to AI and Robotics solutions in the domain of cities and communities, to speed up the transition towards a greener and more digital Europe.

CitCom.ai is organized around the three essential concepts of POWER, MOVE, and CONNECT. POWER is about innovations that improve energy consumption and utilization in cities and communities. MOVE refers to mobility and logistics where we see a great potential to improve quality of life. CONNECT refers to the need to connect citizens, infrastructures, AI and robotics services securely.

Technological benefits of the project will include validation in real conditions of next generation AI-powered robotics and AI-based automation, decision-support and decision-making tools, benefitting from large-scale data access, sharing and integration, bringing them to a higher technology readiness level, as well as increased competitiveness of European developers of AI solutions, in particular SMEs, through the support provided by the TEF, to bring their products to market.

Through the involvement of a research team from the Networked Embedded Software Lab (NESLab), coordinated by Prof. Luca Mottola, the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of Politecnico di Milano contributes expertise across a range of topics core to the CitCom.ai proposal, including AI, machine learning, mobile robotics, and Internet of Things.