Imagine a robot with such a high level of autonomy that it can determine its own goals and decide on which strategy to pursue in real-world situations. The EU-funded PILLAR-Robots project is developing a new generation of robots that can build on the experience acquired during the robots’ lifetime to fulfil the wishes of their human designers/users in real-life applications. Researchers will operationalise the concept of "purpose," drawn from the cognitive sciences, to increase robot autonomy and domain independence during autonomous learning. The goal is to provide the robots with the knowledge and skills needed to operate under targeted applications. The project will use purposeful intrinsically motivated cognitive architecture in agri-food, edutainment and unstructured industrial/retail field demonstrations.