Robots and underlying robotics science and technology are dominating more and more on service delivery and on industrial activities. Both service robots, for commercial and private use, and industrial robots are recording impressive growth rates. Indicatively, in 2023 the second highest installation count in history was recorded for industrial robots. The annual installations exceeded 500,000 units for the third consecutive year. This means that robot stock was 4.3 million units (+10%) and the annual growth rate (CAGR) for the reporting period 2018-2023 is +12%[1]. Similarly, for the service robots 2023 was a year with a continuous growth. In numbers, the new professional service robots, including Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), were 205,000 units (+30%), the new medical robots were 6,200 units (+36%) and the new consumer service robots were 4.1 million units (+1%)[2]. In 2023, the European operational stock of industrial robots was computed at 777,596 units and Europe was the second largest market in Robot installations (92,393 units). The top 3 EU markets in installations are Germany, Italy and France with 28,355, 10,412 and 6,386 units, respectively. Europe, and its member states, hold a strong position in the robotics landscape either for service robots or industrial robots. In several countries robotics have become an integral part of everyday life. Indicatively, Sweden is an EU country making significant strides in robotics with 321 robots per 10,000 employees, Denmark is emerging as a key player in robotics and is particularly known for its expertise in collaborative robots (cobots). Finaly, Belgium recorded an 242% increase in revenue from robotics[3]. To summarize, the EU robotics market size was valued at $14.61B in 2024 and the market size is projected to grow from $15.27 B in 2025 to $22.69 B by 2034. In addition, a CAGR of 4.5% during the forecast period (2025 – 2034) is expected and the mobile robotics category had the largest share of the robotics market[4].
The ultimate goal is to support innovation, facilitating the robots to exit the lab bench and enter the European market. For this to happen, research partners, industrial partners, technology providers and policy makers from the EU ecosystem need to work together. A clear and agreed strategic plan is needed to bring more European investments, targeting education, digital skills, technology, research and science. Investments should also target activities related to development and deployment along with integration and uptake leading to overall maximised impact to European economy and society. It is critical to understand that robotics growth will happen only if we avoid isolated growth. Exogenous growth is what is desired and is based on the interaction between robotics sector and the sectors that can boost productivity via the extended use of smarter robots. The key application areas that exogenous growth is expected are manufacturing & industry (assembly cars, moving palettes & other goods); healthcare (minimal-invasive surgery); home care (assisting elderly & disabled people); agriculture (pruning, weeding, spraying, monitoring & milking); security; environment (cleaning waste); transport (autonomous vehicles, drones); and entertainment (cinema and educational games).
As we move towards AI-enhanced robotics, several challenges need to be resolved so that desired advancements are not delayed or postponed. We would like to highlight some of them in order to identify opportunities for advanced research and innovation activities. Therefore, robots which exist and operate in realistic settings need to be capable of performing non-repetitive functional tasks. Such operation will take place via several underlying robotic functions such as guidance, navigation, manipulation, and interaction. Functional issues and challenges need attention in order to manage single tasks of bigger complexity and/or to combine multiple tasks of distinct functions which in turn also increase the overall complexity. Another challenge is how to diffuse robots and explore robotics science and technology in new industries, sectors, and emerging automation services. Efficiency, robustness, and safety are always at the forefront of advanced robotics. At the same time, natural and smooth interactions are needed to discreetly support daily activities. This means that multidisciplinary approaches and integration of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) across robotics-oriented research and innovation is also a challenge. Another big challenge is the enhancement of the so-called European robotics presence, which in turn will support the overall European scientific and technological excellence via the development and the exploitation of key technologies which need to face significant advancements. Furthermore, a societal challenge needs to be carefully considered. Scientists, researchers, and technology providers need to consider how the robotics advancements are contributing to the creation of new opportunities that will affect the European society in long term scale and how the wider and broader impact will be reached. Finally, there are several major areas of functional performance that need further progress via research, innovation, and development. We could mention by name the navigation capabilities, the manipulation capabilities, the advanced cognitive capabilities, perception capabilities and the integration of sensing.
TORNADO, in order to address the challenges mentioned before, is moving around three complementary R&D axes, synergistically boosting the ability of AMRs to successfully navigate, interact with humans and manipulate soft or deformable objects (SSDs) in complex, time-varying, real-world environments to an unprecedented degree[5]. TORNADO will develop an innovative, multifunctional and adaptive cloud robotics platform, supporting advanced navigation of an AMR within complex, time-varying, real-world, human-populated indoor environments. The TORNADO AMR will be able to manipulate SSDs to an unprecedented degree of success, as well as to naturally interact with humans via hand gestures or verbal conversation, by exploiting the zero-shot generalization abilities of deep neural Foundation Models (FMs) for robotics. The adaptive TORNADO system will allow the robot to perform difficult, non-repetitive manipulation tasks on previously unseen SSDs that may change shape during handling, as well as to flexibly adjust to SSDs of different sizes during operation. Measurement of human trust to interactive robots and human behavioral modeling will aid optimal integration/ acceptance of TORNADO into society. Validation will take place in 3 different industrial Use-Cases: Gears Factory – Manipulation of small gears and flexible materials, Hospital Environment – Assistance in palliative patient care and Plant Distribution Centre – Product quality control and waste collection.
ITML is the TORNADO Project Coordinator. ITML also leads the development of the Sound and Language Manager (SLM) module and all its internal algorithms, which is responsible for providing real-time text-to-speech, speech recognition, text sentiment classification and generic intelligent dialogue functionalities, via pretrained audio FMs and Large Language Models (LLMs), with appropriate task/UC-specific heads appended as/if needed, so that the TORNADO AMR can engage in verbal dialogue, receive verbal orders and answer questions. You can step in the TORNADO website and explore the project vision and objectives, partners and use-cases and finally the project results, based on the technical advancements, and related to the expected outcomes and wider impact.
[1] https://ifr.org/wr-industrial-robots/
[2] https://ifr.org/wr-service-robots/
[3] https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/robotics/europe
[4] https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/europe-robotics-market-13945
[5] https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101189557
