As part of our dissemination activities we organized the Workshop “Technology Monitoring: Robotics today and tomorrow – Technology towards Assistive Automation”. It was part of the OWL MASCHINENBAU Academy. OWL MASCHINENBAU is a network of innovation targeting to strengthen the economic and technological power of the regional industry in production technology. It is an association of local industry, SME, and research institutions of the region East-Westphalia. It targets to transfer research to application in industry, to initiate cooperative networks, and to organize advanced training.

Our workshop focused on challenges arising from the dramatic changes of technology in automation and particular robotics especially with regard to close collaboration of humans and machines. This collaboration has big potential to improve manufacturing work flow strengthening the global competitiveness and sustaining the local value chain. The workshop approached the topic “interactive robotics” from two sides: it introduced future technologies (redundancies, force control, innovative controls) enabling human-robot interaction and showed methods for interactive configuration and safe operation of such systems. The goal of the workshop was to give an outlook on technology which might be introduced in the next years into the automation and production field and will influence future production systems. Questions concerning safety, acceptance, and the role of the Spitzencluster it’s owl2 (Intelligente Technische Systeme OstWestfalenLippe) for the local area completed the workshop. The main presenters were Dr. P. Pfaff from KUKA Laboratories, Dr. M. Ruskowski from Carl Cloos Schweißtechnik, Dr. F. R ̈thling from Robert Bosch GmbH, Prof. Dr. A. Schneider from FH Bielefeld, and Dr. A. Swadzba and Prof. Dr. J. Steil from Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab). The workshop ended with hand-on demonstrations in the CoR-Lab.