ERF 2018: the Robotics community at the Finnish Winter Wonderland!

A winter European Robotics Forum 2019 (ERF) in Finland

Snowy privileged landscapes surrounded this year’s European Robotics Forum (ERF) celebrated in Finland. The European robotics community was brought together in the city of Tampere to take part in this must-attend event, with an agenda full of highlights. Here’s a glimpse of our ERF experience!

TIAGo wearing a traditional Finnish suit. Credits: euRobotics / Visual Outcast

“Robots and Us”

One sign that proves how the sector is gaining relevance is that participants’ numbers keep increasing year after year, growing to over 900 attendees in this edition. The humanoid REEM-C and the cobot TIAGo were quite busy on the crowded exhibition area!

It is remarkable the amount of Workshops – more than 50 – that tackled each and every aspect of robotics with experts and specialists. In some of them, we shared our experience in developing biped and collaborative robots, and participated in discussions on the challenges that the field is facing.

ROS makes it easier

Learning robotics has become much easier thanks to the Robot Operating System (ROS). One of the actions we took for that purpose is to put available the simulation of all of our robots for free on their ROS Wiki. During the “Teaching Robotics with ROS” Workshop, we talked about the TIAGo Tutorials published on its ROS Wiki, with easy steps to run the robot in simulation and test any idea on it.

Getting closer to the Finnish locals

Once in Finland, TIAGo got into the mood very fast, to the point that he co-hosted the ERF Gala Dinner wearing a traditional Finnish custom – following with last year’s kilt edition in Scotland!

ERF organizers made us feel like locals bringing us to traditional experiences, such as the combination of sauna and winter swimming in a frozen lake that some attendees could enjoy (and suffer at the same time). We also had the opportunity to talk about robotics with the new generations of Finnish kids – hopefully some roboticists will be born from this!

Thank you euRobotics and ERF 2018 organizers for making this European Robotics Forum possible! Can’t wait for the next edition; Romania, here we go!