The fifth edition of one of the most influential events for the European robotics community took place last week from March 12-14 in Rovereto, Italy. As always, the 3-day program was jam-packed with dynamic workshops, seminars and talks, making it possible for robotics stakeholders from the whole of Europe to discuss the future of robotics research and industry, find new potential business applications and expand their professional network.

iCub and COMAN side by side at the Forum exhibition

This year’s Forum revolved around the theme “City of Robots” and explored a wide range of human interactions with robotic technology – from healthcare and industrial robotics to AI and robot cognition. The Forum exhibition was held at the MART Museum of modern art, but some robotic demonstrations were also distributed across the city.

Some activities also aimed to promote the wider acceptance of entrepreneurship among robotics researchers. The Entrepreneurship Workshop, for instance, provided several teams with top-notch entrepreneurship coaching and gave them a chance to demonstrate their ability at pitching innovative ideas to a panel of investment judges. The euRobotics Forum Entrepreneurship prize awarded to the most convincing team went to the Robocone project, which envisioned a swarm of robotised cones capable of performing automatic beaconing and signalling tasks on the road without human intervention.

The Forum is organised by euRobotics AISBL, a Brussels based non-profit association, specifically designed as a Public-Private Partnership with the European Union. The collaboration with the European Commission is thus one of the association’s main priorities aimed at developing and implementing a future research and innovation strategy in the field of European robotics.

Next European Robotics Forum will be held in March of 2015 in Vienna, Austria.

Hiro, a humanoid robot developed by professor Osamu Hasegawa at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been proclaimed a ¨world first¨for its ability to ¨learn¨from its environment and research relevant information on the web.

While Hiro seems to be an impressive robot, he’s not in a league of his own. Experts in the field have been focused on developing these types of ¨learning¨robots for quite sometime. However, the fact that these types of robots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, emphasizes the need to get the word on the street! “I want people to know we already have this kind of technology. We want people with different backgrounds and in different fields to discuss how it should be used, while it is still in its infancy” states professor Hasegawa in an article on Hiro.

As expressed in the article, this type of robot could be useful for a wide range of purposes— domestic, traffic control, and even earthquake detection. Dr. Vincent C. Müller, the research coordinator for the project EUCogII,  was one of 400 experts who attended the 2011 European Robotics Forum earlier this year in Västerås, Sweden.  Müller believes cognitive robots could  hold the key to solving situations like Fukushima, whose unfolding events cannot be predicted. “We need to focus on developing intelligent, flexible, biologically inspired alternatives.  Robots of the future need to be less like laptops and more like cockroaches, adaptive and low power”.

Paolo Dario, head of one of the European Commission’s 2011 Flagship Initiatives:  Robot Companions for Citizens,  was another expert present in Västerås. He describes the robots his team is aiming to develop as ¨apprentices able to learn from experience, to understand the goals of their actions, to adapt to contingencies and to anticipate, in a developmental and evolutionary way, the intentions of their human companions.¨