The International Roadmap Initiative for Robotics and Automation (IRIRA): The goal of IRIRA is to collect a technology roadmap for the selected topics in robotics and automation that may interest industry and commercial sectors for their reference. The outcome presents the collected views of industry and research community that are arranged in terms of possible scenarios, including a vision of the industry at a set time in the future; what new types of products or services markets will require in the future; the enabling technologies to create those products or services; the feasibility of creating the enabling technologies; the technological alternatives for achieving the needed technologies; and how to address these technology needs through R&D. The roadmap will provide a broader view of the technologies required for meeting the various business and market needs, human resources needs, governmental and nongovernmental barriers, and many other related topics.
In general, technology roadmapping helps the a society members such as companies, industries and R&D organizations plan what they must do to succeed in future markets. Technology roadmaps:
- Predict, based on well-informed assumptions, the market’s future technology and product needs.
- Identify the science and technology areas with the highest potential for an industry.
- Identify critical enabling technologies that will be needed and the gap (in terms of technology development) between what exists and what is needed.
- Support informed, strategic technology investment decisions.
- Avoid risky, unproductive technology investments.
- Increase collaboration and partnerships among companies through the sharing of knowledge.
- Establish the consensus needed to move forward on a program of technology-development R&D.
- Establish a framework to coordinate R&D and leverage R&D investments among companies.
- Define the steps required to transfer technology to marketable applications.
Technology roadmapping is a first step toward ensuring an industry’s future competitiveness.
Available roadmaps will most likely be quite different, both because of different scopes but also due to regional differences in the (so far identified) needs for new robot technologies. In total, this calls for a community effort.
Please add (after getting a wiki account) your contributions and suggestions, or provide it to klas@cs.lth.se or Hadi Moradi moradih@ut.ac.ir or moradi@usc.edu
Document provided by Bruno Sicilianotab_roadmap.doc