The EuRoC Project: Motivations and Design of the Challenges

This chapter describes the main motivations leading to the EuroC project and the design of the three Challenges. The design of the European Robotics Challenges (EuRoC) project was based on the belief that the definition of competitions and making them visible as “Grand Challenges” helps to create the required awareness of the core Research and Innovation issues to be solved in the community at large. In order to speed up the process of bringing innovative technologies from research labs to industrial end-users, as well as to exploit synergies across application experts, technology developers, system integrators and service providers, EuRoC launched three industry-relevant robotics Challenges within three industrially relevant scenarios. The design of the Challenges was carried out starting from the following main specifications: Adoption of an open call framework, involvement of the whole supply chain, development of each Challenge into three stages of increasing complexity. The design of the overall architecture of the Challenges was collaboratively elaborated within the EuRoC core consortium.