ECHORD at the European Robotics Forum 2011
Within the setting of the European Robotics Forum, held April 6-8, 2011 in Västerås, Sweden, ECHORD hosted two workshops and a kick-off meeting for the experimenting partners of Call 1, 2 and 3. Apart from attending different workshops, participants had the opportunity to network with key players of the robotics community and to meet their peers with similar research foci within ECHORD from all over Europe. About 50 people took advantage of this unique opportunity.
During the kick-off meeting, experimenting partners of Call 2 and Call 3 were able to briefly outline their experiments. Also, the initial results of experiments which are currently running as well as upcoming experiments were presented. The open and relaxed structure of the event allowed for in-depth discussions during these events and demonstrated close interaction between academia and industry as well as between the different experiments.
The second workshop “Assessment of Scientific and Application Topics in European Robotics” is part of the structured dialogue within ECHORD to strengthen the ties between industry and academia. This workshop was also the platform for presenting the most impressive results of this dialogue collected by opinion polls conducted within the robotics community.
Everyone, ranging from the coordinators of the Forum, to ECHORD’s representatives to the participants, agreed that the Forum was a huge success. The experimenting partners took the opportunity to meet other partners during and after the workshops in order to explore and discuss their common research foci and their experiences and challenges in the project thus far. Not only did scientific discussions take place within the workshops, but outside of the official framework of the forum personal exchanges and in-depth interchange of ideas took place. This is exactly one of the main benefits intended by the ECHORD coordinators and it is an integral part of ECHORD’s networking and communicative character. This exchange of experiences paved the way for more interactive cooperation beyond the scope of individual experiments, for instance, by decisions to jointly use testing set-ups. Moreover, there were examples of knowledge transfer which can be utilized for future occasions.
Without a doubt, one of the highlights of the Forum was the speech of the new Head of Unit of the European Commission of DG Information, Society and Media, Khalil Rouhana, who described a vision of the future with a focus on innovation and on industry-academia cooperation under the umbrella of EU-funding schemes.
To see fotos of ECHORD’s presence at the Forum, please click here.
To get to the slides which were presented within the ECHORD kick-off meeting and workshops, please click here.
