News Story

KMi at the European Robotics Forum

Danita Davidson, Wednesday 14 Mar 2018

Ilaria Tiddi and Emanuele Bastianelli were among 800 top European experts who attended the European Robotics Forum (ERF2018) in Tampere, Finland on 13-15th March 2018. Under the theme "Robots and Us", ERF2018 covered current societal and technical themes related to the field of robotics. Interesting subjects being featured include human-robot-collaboration and how robotics can improve industrial productivity and service sector operations. Attendees were comprised of researchers, engineers, managers, and a growing number of entrepreneurs, business people, and public funding officers from all over Europe who discussed the technology push and market pull and how innovation in robotics can be accelerated.

Ilaria, Emanuele and Prof. Enrico Motta are also participating in a new project, SciRoc, which is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 SPARC initiative, and builds on KMi’s smart-city projects, MKSmart and CityLabs, which involve collaborations with Milton Keynes Council, European Regional Development Fund, Department for Communities and Local Government and local SMEs.

SciRoc is a collaborative project which will run novel, robotic tournaments, under the badge of the European Robotics League. The tournaments will invite teams to compete in three vibrant fields of robotics: industrial, service and emergency robotics. Biennial major tournaments will be held in Smart Cities, where robots from all three categories will come together to interact with the smart infrastructure in familiar urban settings.

These competitions aim at replicating consistent benchmarking results more than stating a winner of a single event, and have been designed to target three clear objectives: the European societal challenge of aging population, the strengthening of the European robotics industry and to push the state of the art in autonomous systems for emergency response.

In addition, robot competitions meet educational needs and can serve as an excellent platform for developing the skills of future engineers and scientists, raising student awareness and understanding of applied research and development in robotics.

SciRoc is led by

University of the West of England, Bristol.

with the following members

Hochschule Bonn-Rhein- Sieg (Germany)
Fundacion Andaluza para el Desarrollo Espacial (Spain), the
NATO Science and Technology Organisation (Belgium),
Eurobotics AISBL (Belgium),
Associacao Do Instituto Superior Tecnico Para a Investigacao e Desenvolvimento (Portugal),
The Open University (UK)
Politecnico de Milano (Italy),
Universita Degli Studi di Roma la Sapienza (Italy)
Universitat Politecnica de Cataluya (Spain)
Further reading:

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/discover-new-h2020-robotics-projects-contributing-sparc-strategy

https://www.eu-robotics.net/robotics_league/about/the-european-robotics-league/index.html

www.robotics-league.eu

http://www.eu-robotics.net/sparc