We are very excited to invite you to join us at our workshop: Empowering Robotics Research and Tech Transfer via Competitions, taking place at the European Robotics Forum (ERF) 2020 in Málaga, Spain on Thursday 5 March.
The workshop will be split into two parts: 8:30-10:00 and 10:45-12:15. The first part is organised by members of the SciRoc Consortium while the second part is organised by PAL Robotics.
Competitions are proving to be a successful approach to push robotics boundaries forward while creating strong bonds and relationships within the robotics community, both in Europe and worldwide. The number of robotics teams involved in competitions is rising, and the types of competitions are diversifying, from domestic scenarios to emergency, professional or even urban Smart Cities environments.
Robotics competitions stand as an effective formula to take robots out of the laboratory and into the real world, where they have to face unexpected events and teams are pushed to their limits to solve them. This fosters technical advances, and creates a useful bench marking for robotics applications, yet there’s still work to be done in order to transfer this valuable progress into the market.
This workshop aims to showcase the latest highlights of the main and new European and International competitions; will analyse the position of Europe in this context, either hosting competitions and promoting successful teams who can become the innovators of the future; and will open a discussion with experts on how the knowledge generated through competitions can be transferred into actual marketable robotics applications. To this effect, the workshop aims to gather competitions’ organisers, roboticists who have taken part in competitions, and sponsors and contributors to such challenges, to give their views and share their knowledge as well as experiences from companies that have been able to improve their robotic products thanks to their involvement in competitions.
The overall goal is to identify the ways in which robotics competitions generate a positive outcome within the robotics community and state-of-art, and how can these results be best driven to have an impact in the real world.
We hope to see you there!