Robot Competitions Kick Innovation in Cognitive Systems and Robotics - RoCKIn

Robotics has come a long way from the intensive manipulator- and AGV (automatic guided vehicles)-based robotic automation systems of the 1970s, which displayed little intelligence, to the service and industrial robots of today, which aim to act in largely unstructured scenarios populated with humans. Smarter robots should be dependable, should interact more naturally with humans, and should be part of the permanently evolving and rich ICT infrastructure currently available in modern public spaces and factories.

Robotics needs now an impetus that brings existing appealing prototypes from research laboratories to actual products in the mass market. One of the driving forces for such a significant and long-awaited technology transfer to happen is to focus the research in robotics on integrated systems that address and solve grand challenges. Obviously, the goal is not simply to realize a robotic system engineered to solve that particular challenge, but to develop formal methods that enable systematic approaches to building better and smarter robots in a given class of applications, benchmarked against building blocks common to most grand challenges for robots. It was on this basis that RoCKIn was formed.

RoCKIn is an EU funded project, being run by six partner organisations:

Advisory Board Members:

XiaoPing Chen, University of Science and Technology of China, China
Jon Agirre Ibarbia, Tecnalia, Spain
Adam Jacoff, NIST, USA
Bruno Siciliano, University of Naples Federico II, Italy
Bill Smart, Oregon State University, USA
Oskar von Stryk, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Manuela Veloso, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA

Experts Board:

Alessandro Saffiotti, Örebro University, Sweden
Herman Bruyninckx,University of Leuven, Belgium
Tijn van der Zant, Windesheim Flevoland University of Applied Science, The Netherlands