The HERCULES project has begun. HERCULES has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and will provide the required technological infrastructure to obtain an order-of-magnitude improvement in the cost and power consumption of next generation robotic applications. The Consortium is composed of Pitom and 6 more partners, namely the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (project coordinator), University of Prague, ETH Zurich, Evidence, Magneti Marelli, and Airbus. PITOM will support Magneti Marelli and Airbus on their respective Use Cases, and lead the industrial exploitation of the project results. HERCULES will develop an integrated framework to allow achieving predictable performance on top of cutting-edge heterogeneous CTOS multi-core platforms, implementing real-time scheduling techniques and execution models recently proposed in the research community. The framework will be applied to two innovative industrial use cases: a pioneering autonomous driving system for the automotive domain, and a visual recognition system for the avionic domain .