IERA Forum and Award at ICRA2007
Posted on May 06, 2007
The third Industry Forum on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (IERA’07) in Robotics and Automation was held on April 10, 2007 in Rome. The Forum is sponsored by IEEE-RAS and the International Federation of Robotics and is held alternately at IEEE and IFR conferences.
In addition several industries made substantial contributions in support of the forum. Platinum Level Sponsors were KUKA Roboter, Samsung Electronics, and Automatica. Gold Level Sponsors were CEA/LIST and Yujin Robot.
Invention and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation Award
The morning session included plenary addresses by the finalists for the Invention and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation Award and presentation of the Award. This year there were 22 applications for the IERA award (compared with 12 in 2005 and 8 in 2006). The evaluation committee, which included members of both the IFR and RAS, chose the six finalists. Abstracts of the presentations by the award winners and finalist will be posted on the RAS Industrial Activities Webpage, http://www.ieee.org/industrial .
The winners and finalists were:
- Winner: AutoStrad®: An Autonomous Straddle Carrier for Movement of Shipping Containers,Hugh Durrant-Whyte, Mike Stevens (Australian Centre for Field Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia) and Daniel Pagac, Ben Rogers, Graeme Nelmes, (Patrick Technologies and Systems, Port Botany, Sydney, Australia)
- 2nd Place: Reaching the unreachable with snake-arm robots Rob Buckingham, Andrew Graham,, (OC Robotics, Bristol, UK)
- 3rd Place KR 3 SI – Safe human-robot interaction without fences, Peter Heiligensetzer (MRK-Systeme GmbH, Augsburg, Germany)
Finalists
- The SCHUNK Dextrous Hand (SDH) Matthias Haag, Andreas Hoch, Florian Simons, Karsten Weiss (SCHUNK GmbH & Co. KG), Lauffen, Germany)
- NesbotTM – Investigating New Technologies and Business Models in the Food and Beverage Distribution, Nicola Tomatis, (BlueBotics SA, Lausanne, Switzerland), Christian Jarisch, (Nespresso Paudex, Switzerland)
- Quattro – A new robot manipulator for ultra-high-speed packaging applications, François Pierrot, Olivier Company, Sébastien Krut, (LIRMM CNRS, University of Montpellier 2) Vincent Nabat, Agustin Saenz (Fundación Fatronik), Seema Gupta, (Adept Technology, Inc.).
The afternoon workshop consisted of six presentations and a panel discussion. Speakers represented commercial, government, and academic perspectives. The featured presentations were:
- World robotics statistics and forecasts, Gudrun Litzenberger, Director, IFR Statistical Department, hosted by VDMA Robotics + Automation, Frankfurt, Germany
- The future of industrial and service robotics (from an entrepreneur’s perspective) , Bernd Liepert, CEO, KUKA Roboter GmbH, Augsburg, Germany
- Fostering industrial automation in Europe: ManuFuture perspective and the 7th Framework Programme, Prof. Dr. Francesco Jovane, Director, ITIA-CNR, Milano, Italy
- The Challenge of robotics of the future. Prof. Dr. Henrik Christensen, Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
- Enhancing the robotics industry in Europe: Robotics R&D in the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme Dr. Colette Maloney, DG INFSO, CEC, Luxemburg
- METI’s policies for enhancing the robotics industries in Japan, Yoshihiro Kaga, Industrial Machinery Division, METI, Japan
Panel Discussion
The panel discussion was based on the following economic realities.
- One large corporation’s turnover today is about 50-100 Billion Euro.
- Today’s turnover of the whole robotics industry is about 15 Billion Euro.
The questions addressed by panel members and other forum participants were:
- How could robotics become a real big business?
- What are the driving forces, how to promote it?
The 2007 Forum was chaired by Sukhan Lee, (RAS Vice President for Industrial Activities) and Stefan Müller (President of IFR). The organizing committee also included Klas Nilsson (Awards), Rainer Bischoff (Program), Erwin Prassler (Awards and Program), Paolo Fiorini (Local Arrangements and Finance), Hadi Moradi (Secretary).
