Robotics and Automation Magazine

March 2006

The European Robotics Network (EURON) has launched the first European Robotics Symposium (EUROS). This symposium is a response to demands for a high quality scientific event to present the best research on robotics across applications and topics. Over the last 4 years the EURON annual meeting has served to bring together the European Robotics community, but it has primarily been a networking event to discuss community issues rather than a scientific event. By contrast, EUROS is intended to match the tradition of other strong European meetings such as ECAI, ECCV, ECC, etc. While it is named the European Robotics Symposium, submissions of high quality work from anywhere have been encouraged. EUROS will be organized every two years at European locations, with the first taking place from March 16 to 17, 2006 in Palermo, Italy, followed by the annual EURON meeting on March 18. For the first meeting 50 papers were received that were reviewed by the international program committee. Papers were assigned to 3 reviewers and a selection based on quality was initiated. In the end 16 papers were accepted for presentation. Each paper will be presented in a single track with adequate time for presentation and discussion to maximize impact and critical discussion. The papers have been collected in a special volume of the STAR series, edited by Henrik Christensen, the EURON Coordinator and Symposium Chair.

EURON has issued its third call for proposals. As part of its research coordination the network invites applications for support in terms of: Prospective Research Projects (PRP), Research Ateliers (RA) and Special Interest Groups (SIG). A PRP is a small research project, an RA is well-defined work to investigate a specific topic, and a SIG is a micro community formed to address a specific topic. The deadline is April 15, 2006.

In the meantime, the sixth call of the EU Information Society Technologies has been issued which is devoted to Advanced Robotics. The objective is to address some of the key challenges for the paradigm shift of robotic equipments in their evolution from a specific industrial technology to a broad enabler for a wide range of products and services that are entering the consumer, home and entertainment markets. The work will address the development of more intelligent, flexible, cost-effective, modular, safe, dependable, robust and user-driven robot systems. This will pave the way to the future massive introduction of robots in everyday human environments and their close cooperation with people. The deadline is April 25, 2006.

For further information, please visit http://www.euron.org. Parties interested in promoting certain activities via this column can contact either Kostas Kyriakopoulos (http://users.ntua.gr/kkyria, kkyria AT central.ntua.gr) or Bruno Siciliano (http://wpage.unina.it/sicilian, siciliano AT unina.it).

Contributed by Kostas Kyriakopoulos and Bruno Siciliano