Robotics and Automation Magazine

June 2005


The Annual Meeting of the European Robotics Research Network (EURON II http://www.euron.org) took place between February 16-18, 2005 in the campus of Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland. This annual event was attended by 200+ researchers representing 90+ European research teams. A number of issues of interest to the European robotics research community were addressed. Those included: the EURON annual report, research coordination and roadmap / benchmarks, education and training including summer schools, industrial links efforts, Dissemination and the Robo-ethics Atelier.  

This year's invited plenary session speakers were Prof. Inoue ("The birth of robotics and its development") and Prof. L. Parker ("Large scale robotics"). Workshops included subjects such as the "European Robotics Roadmap" and "Open Source Robotics" and overview presentations of the three FET Integrated Projects: COGNIRON, NEUROBOTICS and I-SWARM (see March 2005 issue).  

For the technology transfer award (see September 2004 issue) of this year, 10 submissions consideration lead to two winners, one for a novel new application and another for a deeper science transfer of results. The two winners are:  

  • Albert-Ludwig Universität - Adp Gauselmann AG, "A Table Soccer Robot" (new product) and  
  • Lund Institute of Technology - ABB Automation Technologies, "6DOF force-torque control and an open robot controller" (core robotics component).  

EURON, within its Education and Training activities, is organising annually the Georges Giralt Ph. D Award in Robotics in Europe. This action aims at promoting young PhDs. The award is presented during the annual EURON meeting. This year 12 submissions lead to a short list of 3:

  • Kai Oliver Arras, "Feature-Based Robot Navigation in Known and Unknown Environments", EPFL, Switzerland.  
  • Juan Andrade Cetto, "Environment Learning for Indoor Mobile Robots", UPC, Spain.  
  • Tine Lefebvre, "Contact modeling, parameter identification and task planning for autonomous compliant motion using elementary contacts", KU Leuven, Belgium.  

The final winner was Juan Cetto

Henrik Christensen, EURON II coordinator, said that, next year, the meeting will be in early March to provide a little more time for the IP projects to prepare for their reviews.  

The authors of this column wish to thank Henrik Christensen and Jeanna Ayoubi for providing material for this report. Parties interested in promoting certain activities via this column can contact either Kostas Kyriakopoulos ( http://users.ntua.gr/kkyria, ) or Bruno Siciliano (http://wpage.unina.it/sicilian, ).

Contributed by Kostas Kyriakopoulos and Bruno Siciliano

  

Getting Involved


We hope that you will get involved in many of EURON's activities and encourage others to do so as well.


Attend Meetings


Attending meetings is an excellent way of making contacts and friends within the community. The Annual Meetings are the major instrument for this purpose.


Communicate


A lot of things are happening all the time in the European robotics community: conferences and workshops are being organised, projects are starting, job offers are announced, etc. The EURON mailing list is the place-to-be for all your communications around these topics.
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