RockEU · Robotics Coordination Action for Europe

The European robotics community has grown significantly over the last few years. At the same time public funding enabled the community to become more organised on both the research (EURON) and the industrial (EUROP) side and to develop the currently valid Strategic Research Agenda (SRA).Very recently EURON and EUROP decided to combine their portfolio of activities and member base within a new non-profit organisation, euRobotics AISBL, which intends to engage in a contractual Public-Private Partnership (PPP) with the European Commission (EC). The main players behind this success story have joined in this project to address the most important challenges for the coming three to five years:- Professional coordination of technology roadmapping and implementation of innovation activities- Fostering collaboration among all stakeholders of European robotics- Promoting European roboticsThis project's ambition is to create sustainable solutions for these challenges, building on the successful instruments the robotics community has already experimented with. These instruments have not yet fully achieved the required goals, partly because of a lack of dedicated, professional support and partly because the challenges have changed as a consequence of the higher ambitions and the larger set of stakeholders to be involved. This will change with the recent founding of euRobotics AISBL and the commitment of both industrial and academic stakeholders to more closely and formally cooperate, but especially through the PPP with the EC. The following activities are planned engaging the whole community:- Robotics roadmap coordination- Robotics PPP preparation and ramp-up- Facilitating robotics innovation- Robotics networking- Dissemination and outreachThese core activities will defragment the community and construct a European robotics industry with sufficient identity and presence to create world leadership in terms of both strategic capability and economic impact.