Research Roadmap 2

Goals, key areas and status

The main goals of the EURON II Roadmapping activity are to identify the current driving forces, objectives, bottlenecks and key challenges for robotics research, so as to develop a focus and a coarse timetable for robotics research in the next 20 years.

To both cover the large and highly heterogeneous field of robotics with in-depth analyses and provide a lucid general view, the field is divided in a taxonomy of five key areas:

• Advanced production systems, covering all sorts of robots applied in industrial environments,
• Adaptive robot servants and intelligent homes, dealing with robotic technologies applied in home and living surroundings,
• Network robotics, covering the massive interaction and cooperation between (nano-) robotic agents,
• Outdoor robotics, handling all outdoor applications like driving assistants and autonomous cars, planetary exploration, mining, agricultural and forestall robots, underwater and rescue robots,
• Health care and life quality, covering surgical robots as well as intelligent devices used in examination, diagnosis and rehabilitation.

The expected deliverables of this initiative will involve both new applied and basic science, a number of new technologies which also have applications beyond robotics, and a number of new industries and strengthening of existing companies. Finally, the new human resources and training schemes required for full implementation of the plan and the social impact in terms of growth and quality of life are considered.

The current state of the roadmap can be seen on http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/euron An summary of the roadmap status and the full 137-page pdf document are available in their EURON I deliverable form from April 2004. A first draft of the EURON II version roadmap was prepared on August 1st, 2005.

For more details please email Michael Pardowitz pardow AT ira.uka.de