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This is a list of robotics projects in the European Union (EU), or sponsored by them. It includes recent and past projects sponsored under the European Commission frameworks.
RobotUnion was a project funded under the Horizon2020 program in 2018 (Grant Agreement no 779967), Its main goal was to stimulate SMEs in the robotics sector to develop novel and challenging technology and systems applicable to new markets: manufacturing, civil engineering, agri-food and healthcare. From 2 Open Calls and more than 400 submitted applications, RobotUnion selected 20 robotics scale-ups with the biggest potential. These scale-ups entered a 12-month acceleration program with support from technical, business, and fundraising mentors. On top of that, each company received a cascade funding grant of up to 223K.
The European Robotics Coordination Action (euRobotics) was a project funded by the European Commission (EC) within the 7th Framework Programme that started on 1 January 2010 and ended on 31 December 2012. [1] The project was designed to implement "improvements of cooperation between industry and academia" and the "Promotion of European robotics" [2] by applying concepts under Challenge 2 of the framework: Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics (FP7-ICT-244852). [1]
The European Robotics Research Network (EURON) was founded in 2000, with funds from the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Commission (EC). The starting date was 1 December 2000, with the network's first meeting taking place in Las Palmas, Spain, on 18 and 19 January 2001. The goal of the network is to stimulate and promote research, education, and technology transfer of robotics in Europe. [3] EURON had 230 members in 27 countries as of August 2011, [4] with member institutes all over Europe (including "associated countries" such as Turkey and Israel). These members are all basic and applied research centers in robotics from universities, technology transfer institutes (such as the German Fraunhofer Gesellschaft), national research networks (such as the French National Centre for Scientific Research), or companies (such as ABB or KUKA).
EURON's EC funding was extended in 2004 for four years and ended in April 2008, with the project being known as EURON 2 during this period. Since then the network has continued as a community-driven organization and is at present known as EURON 3. Its major goals are to bridge the gap between the European industrial robotics developers and the mainstream industries that do not yet exploit robotics technology as well as with the general public. EURON also aims to improve the education and training of PhD students and industrial robotics engineers. EURON members were partners in euRobotics with EUROP, a Coordination Action (CA) funded by the EC to help achieve those goals. It also serves as a central contact point for the European Commission, mainly to prepare roadmaps and facilitate access to funding proposals for its members in the area of robotics research, mainly in the current Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union.
EURON has two yearly awards: one for the best PhD thesis of the previous year, and the Georges Giralt PhD Award in honor of Georges Giralt and the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award, which honors examples of effective transfer of technology from universities or research canters to companies.
The IM-CLeVeR project, short for 'Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots', [5] started in 2009 as a 4-year research project to investigate robot design methodology for skills acquisition. Its objectives are: "to develop a new methodology for designing robot controllers that can: (1) cumulatively learn new efficient skills through autonomous development based on intrinsic motivations, and (2) reuse such skills for accomplishing multiple, complex, and externally-assigned tasks." [6] This project aims to solve also combine the work of a highly interdisciplinary consortium involving neuroscientists, psychologists, roboticists, and machine-learning researchers. In October 2012 an outreach video showing the ongoing research on the iCub humanoid robot platform was published on the researcher's webpage. [7]
LEURRE's main goals are: to study, experimentally and theoretically, the global behaviors of mixed societies composed of animals and artificial agents; to develop models and tools for such mixed societies; to provide a general methodology towards the control of mixed societies; and to validate the concepts by applying this methodology to the control of experiments in the laboratory and in agriculture.
The LEURRE project involved interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers and biologists, and lead to the development of a suite of tools:
The European Robotics Platform (EUROP) is one of several European Technology Platforms (ETP) to improve the competitive situation of the European Union. EUROP is an industry-driven framework for the main stakeholders in robotics to strengthen Europe's competitiveness in robotics R&D, as well as global markets, and to improve quality of life. To this aim, EUROP has developed a joint European Strategic Research Agenda (SRA), which would help focus research initiatives and innovative activities toward maximum impact. The SRA was published in July 2009.
EUROP's roots go back to October 2004, when leading European robotics organizations started to formulate the need for a consolidated approach to European robotics, which led to the constitution of EUROP as an ETP in October 2005. From 2010 to 2012, The European Robotics Coordination Action (euRobotics CA), an EU project within the Seventh Framework Programme of the Information and Communication Technology, supported EUROP.
Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.
The Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology is a Directorate-General of the European Commission and is responsible for European Union investment in research, innovation and development of critical digital technologies.
The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific Council, its governing body consisting of distinguished researchers, and an Executive Agency, in charge of the implementation. It forms part of the framework programme of the union dedicated to research and innovation, Horizon 2020, preceded by the Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7). The ERC budget is over €13 billion from 2014 – 2020 and comes from the Horizon 2020 programme, a part of the European Union's budget. Under Horizon 2020 it is estimated that around 7,000 ERC grantees will be funded and 42,000 team members supported, including 11,000 doctoral students and almost 16,000 post-doctoral researchers.
The European Research Area (ERA) is a system of scientific research programs integrating the scientific resources of the European Union (EU). Since its inception in 2000, the structure has been concentrated on European cooperation in the fields of medical, environmental, industrial, and socioeconomic research. The ERA can be likened to a research and innovation equivalent of the European "common market" for goods and services. Its purpose is to increase the competitiveness of European research institutions by bringing them together and encouraging a more inclusive way of work, similar to what already exists among institutions in North America and Japan. Increased mobility of knowledge workers and deepened multilateral cooperation among research institutions among the member states of the European Union are central goals of the ERA.
The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the European Research Area (ERA). Starting in 2014, the funding programmes were named Horizon.
Copernicus is the Earth observation component of the European Union Space Programme, managed by the European Commission and implemented in partnership with the EU Member States, the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Environment Agency (EEA), the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), Frontex, SatCen and Mercator Océan.
The Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) is the European Commission's primary public repository and portal to disseminate information on all European Union (EU) funded research projects and their results in the broadest sense.
The Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) of the European Commission is meant to improve the competitiveness of European companies facing the challenges of globalization. The programme is mainly aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which will receive support for innovation activities, better access to finance and business support services. It will run from 2007 to 2013.
The Integral SatCom Initiative (ISI) was an Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) European Technology Platform (ETP) led by the European SatCom industry and supported by the European Commission to address Satellite Communications (SatCom) strategic research and innovation challenges. It gathered approximately 200 member organisations representing all the stakeholders of the European SatCom sector from 29 different countries. It included members from manufacturing industry, network operations and service provision, SMEs, research centres and academia, European and National Institutions. Some international research entities do also participate. In 2013, after a public call by the European Commission to re-structure ETPs to better fit Horizon 2020 interests, ISI formally merged with Net!Works ETP to form NetWorld ETP, bringing together almost 1,000 partner organisations. NetWorld would become the partner ETP in the contractual public-private innovation partnership on 5G Infrastructures with the EU in December 2013.
The European Robotics Platform (EUROP) is one of several European Technology Platforms (ETP) to improve the competitive situation of the European Union. EUROP is an industry-driven framework for the main stakeholders in robotics to strengthen Europe's competitiveness in robotics R&D, as well as global markets, and to improve quality of life. To this aim EUROP has developed a joint European Strategic Research Agenda (SRA), which would help focus research initiatives and innovative activities towards maximum impact. The SRA was published in July 2009.
The Human Brain Project (HBP) was a €1-billion EU scientific research project that ran for ten years from 2013 to 2023. Using high-performance exascale supercomputers it built infrastructure that allowed researchers to advance knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, computing and brain-related medicine. Its successor was the EBRAINS project.
INDECT is a research project in the area of intelligent security systems performed by several European universities since 2009 and funded by the European Union. The purpose of the project is to involve European scientists and researchers in the development of solutions to and tools for automatic threat detection through e.g. processing of CCTV camera data streams, standardization of video sequence quality for user applications, threat detection in computer networks as well as data and privacy protection.
The HPC-Europa programmes are European Union (EU) funded research initiatives in the field of high-performance computing (HPC). The programmes concentrate on the development of a European Research Area, and in particular, improving the ability of European researchers to access the European supercomputing infrastructure provided by the programmes' partners. The programme is currently in its third iteration, known as "HPC-Europa3" or "HPCE3", and fully titled the "Transnational Access Programme for a Pan-European Network of HPC Research Infrastructures and Laboratories for scientific computing".
Stardust, which began in February 2013, was a four-year research and training program looking into ways of removing space debris, and ways to deflect asteroids which could have devastating consequences if they crash into the Earth.
ELIXIR is an initiative that allows life science laboratories across Europe to share and store their research data as part of an organised network. Its goal is to bring together Europe's research organisations and data centres to help coordinate the collection, quality control and storage of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments. ELIXIR aims to ensure that biological data is integrated into a federated system easily accessible by the scientific community.
EVolution is a research project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme of the Green Cars initiative. It started on 1 October 2012 with a specified duration of 4 years. The objective of the project was to develop new materials that will significantly reduce the weight of the new generation of hybrid and electric vehicles.
The Georges Giralt PhD Award is a European scientific prize for extraordinary contributions in robotics. It is yearly awarded at the European Robotics Forum by euRobotics AISBL, a non-profit organisation based in Brussels with the objective to turn robotics beneficial for Europe’s economy and society.
The Graphene Flagship is a European Union scientific research initiative. With a budget of €1 billion, it is one of the large scale initiatives organized by the Future and Emerging Technologies program, along with the Human Brain Project and the Quantum Technologies Flagship. Through a combined academic-industrial consortium, the research effort attempts to develop technologies which range from basic research to production and system integration, using the unique properties of graphene. There are some critics of this and similar initiatives, arguing that the funding of graphene-related research and innovation is disproportional to estimates of industrial potential. However, advocates for the Graphene Flagship note the merits of the initiative’s wide-ranging, applications-focused research, and the potential for graphene to catalyze innovation and economic growth across sectors and interest areas including biomedical research and health, transport, water safety, energy efficiency, battery and semiconductor development, wearable electronics, digital communications, sustainability and the environment, and space exploration.
The European Research Executive Agency is a funding body mandated by the European Commission to support the EU Research and Innovation policy. It has been established by the European Commission, based on Council Regulation (EC) No 58/2003.
