Survey and Inventory of Current Efforts in
Comparative Robotics Research

• Introduction
• Organized Workshops
• Robot competitions
• Benchmarking Initiatives in Europe
• Related Workshops
• References

European robotics research platforms

Introduction

The idea of European Robotics Research Centers or Platforms had been discussed in the EURON community in the last years, as already reported in the 2006 second version of this document. Since service robots integrate a very large quantity of cutting-edge technologies, integration and maintenance of such systems is therefore a key challenge that has to be addressed for successful R&D in this field. In this context some discussions took place regarding the installation of some EU Robotics Centers that will integrate and maintain the most sophisticated platforms and offer them for experimentation to the European robotics research community. A simple way of ensuring similar conditions for comparing research could be that these centers would offer as a service to the community the possibility of using their platforms for benchmarking. A simple alternative could be to access remotely some hardware equipments that are made available to the community at large. This is for example the case of the initiative of the University of Siena for remote visual servoing benchmarks that has been described above.

Under the name European Robotics Research Platforms (ERRP) those consortia that provide the best proposal for an ERRP under certain specifications and boundary conditions would be funded. The motivations behind these ERRP are:

• Major steps forward in fundamental research in robotics require the availability of ever more expensive hardware and software platforms, as well as the integration of research results from ever more complementary disciplines.
• The investments in such platforms and human research power are too high for most research institutes.
• Too few potentially good researchers have access to such platforms.
• The European manufacturers of advanced robotics platforms miss too many opportunities to profit from the best research brains in Europe.

These ERRPs should provide, both, the infrastructure and the stimulus, to bring the best European robotics hardware and the best European brains in robotics together, with the minimum of technical and/or logistic constraints, in order to achieve major scientific and technological breakthroughs that can maintain/improve/create a leading role for Europe in some selected robotics application domains.

Needless to say, an ERRP would offer an ideal environment for conducting controlled experiments with:

• an agreed interesting problem.
• an agreed standard procedure, including agreement on:
• choice of parameters.
• what to measure.
• how to measure it.
• how to analyze the results.
• an agreed index of performance.

 

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