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Complex service robotics scenarios entail unpredictable task appearance both in space and time. This requires robots to continuously relocate and imposes a trade-off between motion costs and efficiency in task execution. In such scenarios, multi-robot systems and even swarms of robots can be exploited to service different areas in parallel. An efficient deployment needs to continuously determine the best allocation according to the actual service needs, while also taking relocation costs into account when such allocation must be modified. For large scale problems, centrally predicting optimal allocations and movement paths for each robot quickly becomes infeasible. Instead, decentralized solutions are needed that allow the robotic system to self-organize and adaptively respond to the task demands. In this paper, we propose a distributed and asynchronous approach to simultaneous task assignment and path planning for robot swarms, which combines a bio-inspired collective decision-making process for the allocation of robots to areas to be serviced, and a search-based path planning approach for the actual routing of robots towards tasks to be executed. Task allocation exploits a hierarchical representation of the workspace, supporting the robot deployment to the areas that mostly require service. We investigate four realistic environments of increasing complexity, where each task requires a robot to reach a location and work for a specific amount of time. The proposed approach improves over two different baseline algorithms in specific settings with statistical significance, while showing consistently good results overall. Moreover, the proposed solution is robust to limited communication and robot failures.

In early 2020, the EOSC Community took another crucial step on the road to the development and implementation of the European Open Science Cloud, as seven key EOSC-related Horizon 2020 projects signed a Collaboration Agreement in support of the EOSC Governance. The Agreement involves all the projects supported within the INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019 call. The Agreement provides a useful framework for all parties to collaborate on a wide range of topics, in order to enhance synergies in all mutual activities related to the EOSC. The projects also agreed on a Joint Activity Plan, which will guide them towards the first iteration of EOSC. Overlaps and complementarities among projects were identified, as well as specific areas for potential cooperation, ultimately aimed at the development of a common strategy to synchronise activities with the EOSC Working Groups. Between April and May 2020, EOSCsecretariat.eu collected the position papers on EOSC compiled by the INFRAEOSC 5b projects, the subgroup that specifically includes the four regional projects covering all corners of Europe, as well as the thematic project ExPaNDS. We would like to thank the five Horizon 2020 projects which have contributed to the making of this compilation of EOSC position papers: EOSC-Nordic (GA No. 857652), EOSC-Pillar (GA No. 857650), EOSC-synergy (GA No. 857647), ExPaNDS (GA No. 857641), and NI4OS-Europe (GA No. 857645).

In the HIIG blog series on metaphors of the digital society, we uncover the vocabularies that are thrown around almost haphazardly these days. These terms are often deployed in the scholarly and societal discourse without much thought about their meaning and use. Here, Benedikt Fecher and Tony Ross-Hellauer dismantle one of these metaphors of the digital society: open science. We believe that, depending on how you look at it, open science can be understood as both a tautology and an antithesis.

Cold-water corals form substantial biogenic habitats on continental shelves and in deep-sea areas with topographic highs, such as banks and seamounts. In the Atlantic, many reef and mound complexes are engineered by Lophelia pertusa, the dominant framework-forming coral. In this study, a variety of mapping approaches were used at a range of scales to map the distribution of both cold-water coral habitats and individual coral colonies at the Mingulay Reef Complex (west Scotland). The new ArcGIS-based British Geological Survey (BGS) seabed mapping toolbox semi-automatically delineated over 500 Lophelia reef ‘mini-mounds’ from bathymetry data with 2-m resolution. The morphometric and acoustic characteristics of the mini-mounds were also automatically quantified and captured using this toolbox. Coral presence data were derived from high-definition remotely operated vehicle (ROV) records and high-resolution microbathymetry collected by a ROV-mounted multibeam echosounder. With a resolution of 0.35 × 0.35 m, the microbathymetry covers 0.6 km2 in the centre of the study area and allowed identification of individual live coral colonies in acoustic data for the first time. Maximum water depth, maximum rugosity, mean rugosity, bathymetric positioning index and maximum current speed were identified as the environmental variables that contributed most to the prediction of live coral presence. These variables were used to create a predictive map of the likelihood of presence of live cold-water coral colonies in the area of the Mingulay Reef Complex covered by the 2-m resolution data set. Predictive maps of live corals across the reef will be especially valuable for future long-term monitoring surveys, including those needed to understand the impacts of global climate change. This is the first study using the newly developed BGS seabed mapping toolbox and an ROV-based microbathymetric grid to explore the environmental variables that control coral growth on cold-water coral reefs.