EURON I
The key areas chosen for EURON I (and continued into EURON II) were:
The research coordination has been involved in three major activities.
-
Roadmap of robotic research
The roadmap activity is obviously a critical activity for the
community as a whole, and an important input to the planning of future
funding programmes. A "book of dreams" was collected which formed the
basis for the research roadmap. The early version of the roadmap had a
comprehensive coverage of state of the art across all areas of
robotics, and identification of areas of promise. These ideas were
matured and some of the most immediately possible condensed into the
"Beyond Robotics" initiative.
-
Setup
of benchmarks. Benchmarking is crucial to allow replication of
results across laboratories, thus demonstrating the value of new
knowledge. For empirical research there is a need to survey existing
methods and to design golden standards. In some areas of research
there are established standards, such as the Borenstein odometry test
suite, and sub-communities such as RoboCup have established
competitions that are designed around particular benchmarks. As part
of the research coordination a survey of benchmarks has been
generated. So far it has not been possible to design new benchmarks,
but this is an on-going effort. The generation of the survey has,
however, increased the attention of comparative research and it is
hoped that future work will allow for design of more comprehensive
benchmarks both in terms of methodology, standard data sets, and
golden standards.
- Generation of a database of EU R&D in Robotics.
One problem for European research is that
the community is rather dispersed with little general information across national borders. The problem of community information is both of relevance for the academic research and for the interaction with industry.
A database that outlines R&D efforts throughout Europe has been generated,
also a complementary study has attempted to generate a brief
profile for all the members involved in EURON.
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A fundamental part of community building is
access to human resources and the availability of mechanisms to
provide such resources. To this end the education and training effort
has been directed at four major efforts:
- Analysis of curricula in robotics.
- Set up a repository for robotics education.
To maximise use of resources, it is desirable that
lectures, lecture notes, and exercises carefully designed by one expert
should be available for others to read, adapt, and adopt. Two main approaches
are still ongoing:
-
A database of
teaching materials that can be used freely for educational
purposes.
- the EURON WEBook", an encyclopaedia in
robotics inspired by CVonline. So
far only a few of the entries have been completed, contributions are
welcome.
- Organisation of summer schools. These events are
typically one week of studies in a particular venue with
internationally recognized lecturers. In total 10 summer schools were
organised with an average of 40 students participating in each
event. They have been extremely well received by the PhD
students across Europe and are considered a most valuable
complement to local education on robotics.
- PhD Award. To promote academic research excellence, a prize for best PhD
thesis in Europe has been defined.
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The goal of the EURON key-area 'Industrial Links' is to establish a
dialog between robotic industry and robotic research to reduce the
discrepancy between the state-of-the-art in robotics research versus
actual utilized technology in industrial and service robotics.
The industrial links effort aims to promote
collaboration between academia and industry. The effort has been
pursued in a number of different ways:
- Industry White Papers
- Joint Events
- Statistics
- Technology Transfer Award
- Out-reach Programme
- Database of R&D
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Dissemination is extremely important for community integration and for
research in general. Consequently the dissemination key-area is a
vital component of the EURON effort. The area has been responsible for
- Mechanisms for research dissemination. In particular, the
new series entitled
"Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics - STAR" and seven journal "special
issues".
- A EURON www facility
- Regular information about the EURON effort via dedicated mailing lists.
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EURON is one of several international bodies
that attempt to integrate research internationally. Coordinating with the
others has been achieved in a number of ways, including
special liasons with the
European Robotics Forum (the EU part of IFR), and the
International Advanced Robotic Programme (IARP).
In addition there are good collaborative links with IEEE RAS, and a
regular exchange of information with the Japanese Society of
Robotics. More recently there have been efforts to set up tight links
with Korea and Australia. In general EURON has a strong international
presence and close ties to all relevant entities.
