European research projects

The EU is serious about R&D support, and looking for effective ways to promote cutting-edge research across hte continent and to avoid reinventing the wheel. Let us revisit the most important current efforts.

The EU Coordination actions are ran on a smaller budget, but directly aim to facilitate collaboration between the various groups, sectors, industry and academia. Most relevant for us is the EuroSurge initiative: "the Coordination Action EUROSURGE is carrying out a census of the European laboratories doing research in robotic surgery, to identify available competences and potential missing topics.

This workshop aims at presenting to the robotic community the results of the first six months of the project and to establish a fruitful discussion with experts in the areas of integration, standards, benchmarking, architectures and cognition."

Since dissemination is a key feature of these programs, high quality materials are available at e.g., the EuroSurge workshops organized in at the European Robotics Forum in March and at ICRA, in May. Next edition will be in Milan, early July. 

Traditional basic research programs are also supported. The Robocast ended over a year ago (resulting in great many publications, events and some photos), but we still have the great ACTIVE project: "exploiting ICT and other engineering methods and technologies for the design anddevelopment of an integrated redundant robotic platform for neurosurgery. A light and agile redundant roboticcell with 20 degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) and an advanced processing unit for pre- and intra-operative control willoperate both autonomously and cooperatively with surgical staff on the brain."; or the recently closing ARAKNES. And of course, there are just plenty of new submissions arriving to Brussels for every call. Next updates will come soon!