From the Guest Editors - Industrial robotics applications and industry-academia cooperation in Europe
This special issue is about manufacturing robotics in Europe. Manufacturing has a strong basis in Europe, especially for small industries that quite dynamically carry out an important part of the total manufacturing effort in response to changing product requirements. To meet a wide variety of demands on efficiency and flexibility, a combination of automation systems and human labor must be used. Robots should be considered as coworkers, working in close cooperation with humans. Advances in the use of robots in actual industrial setups calls for real partnership work between academia and industry. Research and development (R&D) on manufacturing requires a systems perspective with domain knowledge, system integrators, and research actors, making it different from most academic research. Consequently, the need for industrial thinking within research in academia is very important. The obvious discrepancy between the state of the art in robotics research versus actual utilized technology deserves attention in different ways. If we want to promote direct contact between researchers (who usually write papers) and industrial engineers (who normally do not read papers), then results have to be put in a true industrial perspective. Packaging results (e.g., in useful software), building prototypes, and carrying out collaboration projects are some means to this end. Furthermore, in almost any real industrial application, there are key aspects that academic research wishes to neglect (possibly for good reasons) but may have to address to achieve results that are within a sufficient industrial perspective. An interesting trend that we think can be seen in the articles of this issue, is that industrial systems actually are getting more and more useful for applied but advanced robotics research. Many of the research results of some 20 years ago are now used inside highly optimized motion controllers, but to meet the demands on interaction and flexibility, the industrially useful systems (that in practice never will be developed in academia) need to be extendable with additional sensing, control, and interaction. Industry and academia meet both in persons and in systems. Just as the robot is the most flexible type of machine, the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) is the most flexible type of company. Manufacturing is facing a major new challenge: the use of robotics in SMEs. Europe is characterized by a long tradition of manufacturing products with a significant knowledge component, i.e., products that integrate significant domain knowledge to achieve a competitive price and quality. Furthermore, the European economy depends heavily on SMEs. The Observatory of European SMEs 2002 (published in