Over the last few years successful coordination activities have been undertaken within the academic and industrial robotics communities (EURON and EUROP), but both communities still struggle with overcoming the community-internal gaps regarding terminology and suboptimally coordinated transfer of research visions, technology and people. This project’s ambition is to create sustainable solutions to all of the above-mentioned gaps, following a policy of targeted stimulation of relevant grass-roots initiatives that both communities have already experimented with during the last couple of years, but that have previously seen little success because of a lack of committed, professional and coordinated support. 

In an ideal world, academia finds solutions required by industry to develop products which fulfil a market need. Both communities benefit from this cooperation – academia receives funds through technology transfer and enjoys the satisfaction of knowing that its work benefits the society, and industry can enhance its marketing position through innovative products. This Coordination Action (CA) gives European robotics an advantage by kick-starting several of the stimulations required for this ideal world to be realised. The driver behind these stimulations is always the robotics industry (since its needs for innovation and strong positioning in the worldwide robotics market are greatest), but the academic research community is heavily involved via a system of flexible, targeted expert contributions whose short-term benefits are easy to identify and communicate.