euRobotics · European Robotics Coordination Action

Over the last few years successful coordination activities have been undertaken within the academic and industrial roboticscommunities (EURON and EUROP), but both communities still struggle with overcoming some remaining gaps: thecommunity-internal gaps of confusion about terminology, suboptimally coordinated transfer of research visions, technologyand people, and the limited coordinated communication with both the general public and professional audiences. Thisincludes the popular science media, European Commission, national funding bodies, and representatives from neighbouringtechnology and market domains, such as cognitive science, mechatronics, automotive, aerospace, security, computer vision,embedded control systems.This project’s ambition is to create sustainable solutions to all of the above-mentioned gaps, following a policy of targetedstimulation of relevant grass-roots initiatives that both communities have already experimented with during the last couple ofyears, but that have previously seen little success because of a lack of committed, professional and coordinated support. Thedriver behind these stimulations will always be the robotics industry (since its needs for innovation and strong positioning inthe worldwide robotics market are greatest), but the academic research community will be heavily involved via a system offlexible, targeted expert contributions whose short-term benefits are easy to identify and communicate.The following activities are planned: improved industry-academia cooperation by giving more structure to commonlyorganised events (administration, annual meetings, web portal on Robotics in Europe, advanced training, roadmapping,and entrepreneurship advocacy) and by coordinated communication to the general public (press releases, visibility at majorrobotics events worldwide, robotics competitions related to the shared research and development roadmap, layman’sexplanation of robotics technology in combination with semantic search support on the web portal).