The main issue being addressed by ROBOTT-NET is getting promising new technologies over the “valley of death”. Many excellent ideas get partially developed but never make it onto the market, despite having good commercial potential. ROBOTT-NET tackles some of the causes of new ideas and technologies getting stuck. These causes are particularly acute for SMEs but also affect larger companies.
Sometimes the short-term risks are seen as too high -- lack of finance and lack of confidence in attracting finance are major problems for SMEs. ROBOTT-NET is designed to alleviate these obstacles by helping companies to develop formal business cases and teaching personnel how to communicate with financiers.
Often people do not have sufficient knowledge of the modern technologies already available and their capabilities. They have neither the time or the digital skills to find the best match for their needs. This means that they may miss an opportunity to build their technology into an optimal system, or don’t know how to fabricate their product efficiently, or hadn’t thought of integrating it with existing systems. ROBOTT-NET brings company personnel into contact with experts in creating optimal systems including a wide range of existing technologies, opening their eyes to wider possibilities.
Thirdly, internationalization is hampered by the need to negotiate the business side of each collaboration separately, the lack of agreed cost models, and non-standardized mechanisms. This results each country or organization performing its own research and innovation, which is inefficient. ROBOTT-NET includes pre-agreed systems for transferring knowledge and expertise between partners, creating standardized templates for pan-European innovation.
Accelerating the path to market of new robot technologies will increase Europe's market share in both industrial and professional service robotics, creating product fabrication jobs. Installing European-standard robotic automation instead of national-standard automation at end-user sites helping companies to optimize their production by introducing and developing novel robotic solutions will contribute substantially to increasing the competitiveness of Europe's manufacturing sector, creating more jobs through increased productivity and prosperity.
The main objective of the ROBOTT-NET initiative is to create a sustainable European infrastructure to support novel robotic technologies on their path to market. Our concept is to build technology transfer RTOs (Research and Technology Organizations) into an international network, exploiting them as one-stop shops for technological and commercial expertise. ROBOTT-NET will verify the best approaches to such collaboration and obtain experience to propel the concept further. During ROBOTT-NET we establish cooperation between four major European technology transfer organizations (Danish Technological Institute, Fraunhofer IPA, MTC and Tecnalia), developing standardized systems for supporting innovation and standardized systems for paying for different types of knowledge transfer. We test and demonstrate our infrastructure by using it on real cases.
ROBOTT-NET directly supports the development of 64 new robotic technologies or systems: for new products, we provide business case analysis, digital skills training, individual roadmaps for their path to market; for new robotic automation, we provide designs, business case analysis, and mock-ups. Further stages of development will be offered for some of these including installing state-of-the-art robotic technologies in eight complete pilot systems.
