Over the last 20 years, robot competitions have emerged as a powerful means to foster progress in robotics research and development (R&D). RoCKIn is part a of new generation of scientific robotics competitions that were launched out of the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme.

The RoCKIn2014 competition event is taking place right now, you can watch the live stream, broadcasting directly from Cité de l’espace science museum and you can also view the live scores from RoCKIn2014 website. Read more below.

The fourth annual EU Robotics Week is on across Europe, with more than 300 activities happening this week in 25 EU countries.

The Pionners Festival took place again this year at the Imperial Palace in Vienna, Austria, bringing together startups and investors from all over the world to talk about entrepreneurship and future technologies. While last year’s robotics startups focused on home appliances, aiming to support elderly or handicapped people to organize their household, this year’s startups are set on fun, entertainment, and learning for the young and the young at heart.

ALCOR Lab members describe their experience.

From September 23rd to October 2nd the first TRADR Joint Exercise (TJEx) took place at the Tremora hospital (ex American hospital of Calambrone) near Pisa, Italy, in cooperation with the TRADR partners and the firefighters from the Firebrigade of Pisa. Using a proven-in-practice user-centric design methodology, TRADR develops novel science and technology for human-robot teams to assist in disaster response efforts over multiple missions.

Tony Prescott, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the Sheffield Center of Robotics believes that the medical industry could be at the forefront of changing the public perception of robotics. Why?  Because this is an industry that already understands how paramount it is, when dealing with the elderly, disabled and ill, to provide a service that is helpful, friendly and nonthreatening.

RE.WORK’s Future Robotics Forum – which took place in London on Tuesday – was an opportunity to hear the stories of key influencers and developers of transformative robotic services and devices, and to learn about the challenges involved in commercialisation.

On the third and fourth days of the euRathlon 2014 marine competition the teams faced two more tasks, and in the last day a combined scenario that included the tasks of the previous days. Visitors saw a demonstration of cooperation between an aerial robot and a land robot, as an advance of euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge.

euRathlon is an outdoor robotics competition focused on realistic emergency-response scenarios inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident. After a successful land-based competition in 2013, a marine-based competition takes place this year in La Spezia, Italy (29 Sept – 3 Oct).

euRathlon is an outdoor robotics competition funded by the European Union with a focus on realistic cooperative search and rescue response scenarios for land, sea and air robots. This year the competition aims to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous underwater/surface vehicles by challenging multi-disciplinary teams of students and engineers with autonomous missions in the marine environment.

When you see a slick robot, you can easily be distracted by the design, the gestures, the interaction, the cuteness. But AUTOMATICA reminds you that there’s a whole lot of “stuff” going on inside that robot.

34,500 visitors from more than 100 countries came to Munich this June to visit AUTOMATICA 2014 and examine the robotics-related wares of 731 exhibitors from over 42 countries.

But why was Esben Østergaard, CTO of Danish Universal Robots smiling? Perhaps it was because his company was one of the showpieces of AUTOMATICA’s focus this year on Service Robots? Or that the software and programming tablet he’s holding were of the caliber that causes disruption in the industry?

Four researchers from Davide Scaramuzza’s Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, have won the prestigious KUKA Innovation Award (20.000 EUR) for their project “Collaboration of Flying and Ground Robots for Search-And-Rescue Missions” at the AUTOMATICA trade fair in Munich.

Several robotics funding announcements have been made recently, the biggest of which was announced at AUTOMATICA 2014. The Partnership for Robotics in Europe launched SPARC – a €2.8 billion public-private program to increase Europe’s share of the global robotics market. Two smaller fundings in the Service Robotics space also occurred.