The Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production (RICAIP) is the European Centre of Excellence in AI and industrial robotics and Industry 4.0 related areas. RICAIP is based on a strategic partnership between leading Czech and German research institutions. The founding partners are CIIRC CTU (Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics at Czech Technical University) together with CEITEC BUT (Central European Institute of Technology at Brno University of Technology), DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and ZeMA (Center for Mechatronics and Automation Technologies), both seated in Saarbruecken. These four founding partners of the RICAIP Centre jointly contribute to RICAIP by making their core facilities available and enable RICAIP to operate in a distributed way.

The partnership within RICAIP will result in transfer of knowledge and expertise from DFKI and ZeMA to CIIRC and CEITEC and vice versa, for a strategic long-term collaboration at all the levels of research, education, innovation management, and technology transfer well beyond this cooperation and the Czech-German borders.

RICAIP focuses on research areas related to Industry 4.0 and will strengthen research in industrial production with a focus on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). The centre will connect testbeds in Prague, Brno and Saarbruecken and, (using virtual and augmented reality) enable remote industrial production control or rapid adaptation according to the customer’s current needs or available means of production.

RICAIP will conduct research in the field of artificial intelligence, robotics for advanced industry, and related fields. RICAIP aims to build a unique distributed research and experimental workplace – the RICAIP Industrial Testbed Core -, the first of its kind in Europe to develop and test innovative solutions for advanced and fully integrated industrial production, continually optimizing to the changing environment. In addition, RICAIP EU Testbed Core aims to become a major contributor to the international standardization efforts of the Industry 4.0 initiative, facilitating technology and knowledge transfer from academia to industry through the deployment and development of technical solutions tested and validated in the relevant industrial environment.

RICAIP Centre will enable a strong interdisciplinary, integration-oriented, and pro-growth approach, gathering the critical amount of international excellence, research capacities, and allowing a new quality of research in Industry 4.0.