January 2020 – La Palma Research Centre

On the 27th of January, an event of half a day was organized by the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME), the University of La Laguna (ULL) and La Palma Research Centre (LPRC) with the collaboration of the Spanish Government delegation in the Canary Islands, to introduce and disseminate the activities of the AGEO Interreg Atlantic Area project to the relevant stakeholders in the region.

AGEO aims to launch several pilots on citizen observatories to highlight how citizen involvement in risk prevention can strengthen regional and national management systems, and the outcome of this specific initiative will be used to formulate recommendations for the creation of future permanent observatories in response to the wide range of hazards in the European Atlantic areas – floods, fires, earthquakes, among others.

The Canarian pilot is being organized in Gran Canaria, Tenerife and El Hierro, with a focus on landslides, where the collaborators will reach out to local communities in order to get them actively involved in the preparation and surveillance of landslides in an Archipelago with a very particular geological activity and characteristics.

The day of the presentation at the Delegation of the Government in the Canary Islands involved Ariadna Ortega, representing La Palma Research Centre, as well as Juan Carlos Santamarta, of the University of La Laguna, who focused on the details of the present and future activities of AGEO. The Geological and Mining Institute of Spain, an autonomous research body attached to the Ministry of Science and Innovation, was represented by Isabel Montoya and Inés Galindo, who illustrated the work of the Copernicus Program and its Management Service (EMS) and the work that will be materialized in the Citizens’ Observatory of the Canary Islands.

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It was in Tallinn, Estonia, that the ROBOMINERS project partners were brought together to discuss the current state of this H2020 project as well as to prepare the future steps in the development of the bio-inspired robot for mining mineral deposits that are small or difficult to access. If successful, ROBOMINERS technology could shape the future of the mineral exploration and exploitation industries and at large adapt the raw materials sector to more sustainable practices.

The meeting in Tallinn, held on the 14th and 15th of January 2020, kickstarted on the first day with a revision of the project’s technical work packages. From Robotics to Raw Materials the ROBOMINERS partners discussed a number of topics that are likely to shape the current and future development of the project’s main concept: to develop a robot that can mine in difficult environments in flooded conditions. After these, technical sessions showed light on the main topics of the project. Here, partners could discuss and contribute to more specific robotics and raw materials items. Examples include the use of legged locomotion as a means of robotic movement or the most adequate geological environments and commodities to be mined with the Robotminer.

On the second day the ROBOMINERS team had a “Workshop on bio-inspired legged locomotion” with presentations based on Robotics developments made by the consortium partners. Then, LPRC hosted its own foresight activity: a Horizon Scanning exercise – where the company members tried to lay the current state-of-play and future developments in key specific areas within the robotics and raw materials fields, in an interactive exercise with the ROBOMINERS internal experts. The results of this exercise will allow the LPRC team to better prepare and adapt the remaining foresight tasks envisaged for WP8 – Active roadmapping and clustering.