Mission 3 will lay the foundations for the next wave of healthcare and personal care robots. This implies to design robots using unprecedented and sustainable structural materials, joints, sensors, actuators, and batteries (A8), as well as to develop new interfaces and algorithms to better the extraction interpretation of users’ intentions and to implement safer and richer interactions between humans and robots (A9). But this is not enough: tomorrow’s prosthetic limbs and rehabilitation treatments will not exist without significant breakthroughs in the fields of (bio)materials interacting with human tissues (A10).

While promoting blue-sky research – which is the lifeblood of innovation – new components will be designed and developed with a special emphasis on their sustainability, and in accordance with the regulatory and ethical guidelines, since the very initial stages. Although the focus of this scientific and technological Mission pertains to the above mentioned healthcare and personal robots (and target groups) it will likely produce important contributions to biorobotics science and engineering at large.

The expected impact of Mission 3 is a new wave of technologies (proofs of concept or proofs of viability) and of knowledge, at the basic or component level, to be integrated into next generation healthcare and personal care robots.