Robotic - Quo Vadis: Robotics and Mechatronics Research for New Markets

After the successful implementation of thousands of industrial robots in a large variety of production plants during the last three decades, robots are gradually appearing in our daily environment, offering their services and interacting with us. These new robots and intelligent systems are getting closer and closer to humans and are thus facing much more complex and dynamic situations. Thus they requiring enhanced capabilities to reason about and interact with their environment. Furthermore, this new markets are quite different from the existing robotics markets, thus requiring new types of industries and distribution channels. The rising products require an optimal integration of precise mechanics, sensing systems and artificial intelligence and are expected to generate important new markets with high added value. However, it is of crucial importance that industry and research institutions strength their collaboration in order to come up with globally successful products and systems. The robotics initiative in the FP7 European Research Program 2007-2013 and similar programs in Asia and US are excellent opportunity to develop the future of robotics. This presentation will address and discuss the very fascinating and challenging new market of service and personal robots. Starting with an overview on the current start-of-the-art, potential entry markets and market forecasts, key challenges will be highlighted and current directions of research and development in the field will be discussed. Major focuses will be on perception, environment representations adapted for artificial reasoning, 3D mapping and navigation in complex and dynamic environments.