European funded projects related to integrated robotic sensing

This repository contains the metadata of 1371 projects in tabular form (combinedProjectData.xlsx). The data was extracted from the European Union’s COmmunity Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) repository.

The dataset was used to support a review of the latest advancements in integrated robotic sensing. CORDIS was interrogated using a Boolean search, combining multiple chosen search terms using precise logical relationships, such as AND and OR. This search approach was used to obtain precise and relevant search results by specifying the relationships among the search terms, saving time and effort while minimising the likelihood of encountering irrelevant or unrelated material. The following Boolean search string was used: “(‘robot’ OR ‘robotic’ OR ‘robotically’ OR ‘roboti?ed’) AND (‘non-destructive’ OR ‘inspection’ OR ‘evaluation’ OR ‘NDT’ OR ‘NDE’ OR ‘sensing’ OR ‘sensor’)”. This resulted in searching projects whose title and short description (teaser) contained at least one of the words in the first set of brackets and at least one in the second set. Note that the “?” in ‘roboti?ed’ allowed looking for the presence of both the British English word “robotised” and the respective American English version “robotized”.

Additionally, the search results were filtered according to the funding schemes. For the sake of reviewing the recent landscape, only projects funded through the HORIZON 2020 and HORIZON EUROPE schemes were considered. The described filtered search returned 1371 projects. The resulting metadata was extracted from the CORDIS repository for each of the found projects: the project start date, the end date, the total cost, the total EU contribution, the fields of science related to the project, the coordinating institution, and the participating institutions. The fields of science of each project are given as a list of strings detailing the fields of science related to the project. Each string shows a variable-depth hierarchy from the broadest classification to specific fields (e.g., “engineering and technology/materials engineering/composites”), following the hierarchical framework adopted by the European Commission. Finally, whereas each project has one and only one coordinator, it can have none, one or multiple participants. For the coordinator and each participant (if present), the following information was extracted: country of the coordinating/participating institution, amount of EU contribution received, amount of other funds available to the institution and the project outcome in terms of peer-reviewed journal papers, conference contributions and filed patents.

Thus, the project metadata extracted from CORDIS was thoroughly analysed. The "fieldsOfScience_SunburstPlot.xlsx" file contains a sunburst chart that offers a lucid overview of the diverse scientific disciplines of the selected projects. The analysis of the fields of science strings has revealed a hierarchical depth going up to the seventh classification level, showing great permeance of robotic NDT and robotic sensing into numerous and specific fields.