Robotics and Automation Magazine

September 2006 issue

The European Robotics Symposium (EUROS) has been conceived to serve as a high quality scientific event for research on robotics across applications and topics, organized bi-annually at European locations. The EURON annual meeting serves to bring the European Robotics community together, but it has primarily been a networking event to discuss community issues rather than a scientific event. By contrast, EUROS aims to match the tradition of other strong European meetings such as ECAI, ECCV, ECC, etc. and seeks for submissions of high-quality, original research from scholars throughout the world. To encourage broad involvement, the program committee is composed of 2/3 European researchers and 1/3 prominent representatives from other regions.

The first EUROS took place between March 16-17, 2006 in Palermo, Italy, where it was followed by the second Annual Meeting of EURON II on March 18, and a post-conference trip to Agrigento on March 19. The meeting was sponsored by the CEC Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) unit as part of the EURON initiative. Henrik Christensen (KTH) served as its General Chair while Antonio Chella (UniPa) was in charge of local arrangements.

The technical program of EUROS-06 included 2 invited talks and 16 high-quality paper presentations in a single track. Around 160 scholars attended. The proceedings have been published as volume 22 of the Springer STAR series.

The technical program had interesting and significant contents, the food was excellent, the breaks were long enough to have proper conversations in, the afternoon sessions gave the opportunity for focused discussion — in short, the meeting was considered as outstanding. "A thousand thanks" to Antonio Chella and his team at the Department of Computer Engineering of the University of Palermo for their great organization!

The EURON Board has decided that EUROS-08 will take place in Prague from March 12 to 15, 2008, which will mark the end of the FET "Beyond Robotics" program and the start of the "Advanced Robotics" program, and thus a number of projects should be complete and new ones taking their place.

For further information, please visit http://www.euron.org/activities/index.html. 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