Last summer, we introduced the Network of Excellence euROBIN in our kick off meeting. euROBIN brings together European expertise on Robotics and AI and establishes an unified pan-European platform for research and development. Leading European research labs are part of our network that it's open to the entire robotics community and provides mechanisms of cascade funding to double its number of members over the next years.
euROBIN-project team
euROBIN comprises 31 partners across 14 countries and it's coordinated by the Institute of Robotics of Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). We seeks to bring together the robotics community and to benefit science, industry, and society while promoting European values. The network is a facilitator of knowledge transfer and exchange between research institutions and industry partners. Its main goals are:
- Addressing the main scientific and technological challenges hampering the breakthrough and large-scale deployment of robotics: euROBIN focuses on making cognition-enabled Robotics solutions more transferable and reusable among scientists and by new industries. This is crucial to better join forces in Europe in this dynamic and very competitive field.
- Providing a stage for cooperation and exchange of scientific knowledge and talents between the most outstanding robotics labs in Europe in the eras of knowledge representation, physical interaction, robotic learning and human-robot interaction.
- Generating a nucleus to which the community at large can adhere, enabling ground-breaking new applications in industrial, personal and outdoor robotics in Europe.
- The network will strongly interact with and benefit from other collaborative EU-initiatives such as the euRobotics association and the AI DATA Robotics Association (Adra), empowering the strength of AI & Robotics in Europe. It builds on and contributes to the assets on the AI-on-Demand platform.
DLR robot demonstration
How will the network euROBIN achieve its goals?
- Leading experts from the European robotics and AI research community will share their algorithms and data (ranging from abstract representations to specific maps and pre-trained models). Transfer of software and models between robots and research groups is central to the project: By bringing excellent research centers together, the network seeks to address the fragmentation of the European AI in Robotics landscape and facilitate technology transfer.
- Software, data and knowledge will be exchanged over the EuroCore repository, designed to become a central platform for robotics in Europe. euROBIN thus creates a sustainable network fostering exchange and inclusion.
- The relevance of the scientific outcomes will be demonstrated in three application domains that promise to have substantial impact on industry, innovation, and civil society in Europe. This includes providing solutions to global challenges such as using robotics in manufacturing and recycling, personal home assistance and the impacts of urbanization, for example in terms of logistics.
- Advances are made measurable through cooperative competitions. Teams will publicly compete on visionary and challenging application on one hand, but the competition rules will be made such that exchange of knowledge, data, and results between teams is equally valued to the mere task performance. If, for example, one teams generates a map of the test environment and another team reuses it, instead of regenerating it from scratch, both teams will gain points.
- An essential element is cascade funding opening up to the community at large the possibility to contribute scientific solutions and participate in the challenges.
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