The second European Robotics Week was held last week from November 26 to December 2, 2012. More than 90 organisations and institutes in 21 European countries organised over 200 robotics related activities for the public and managed to reach approximately 30.000 people across Europe, many of them high school students and elementary school pupils.

The events featured throughout the week offered many opportunities for the public, particularly school kids and students, to have hands on interactions with robots in an educational or public setting.

Great activities such as live demonstrations of dancing robots, soccer playing robots, concerts by robot bands, robots picking beans or locating candles in a circle on a birthday cake, robots visiting schools, art exhibitions...were organised all over Europe. The European Robotics Week was a tremendous success in bringing awareness to the public on how robotics technology impacts our lives.

"The whole European robotics community - leading companies, robotics institutes and universities - worked successfully together to set up the European Robotics Week for a second time. Besides educating the public about the growing importance of robotics and the way it affects our everyday lives, last week was a major opportunity to attract younger generations to study technology and robotics related fields," stated Henrik Schunk, Chairman of EUnited Robotics European Robotics Association and Managing Partner of Schunk GmbH & Co KG, Germany.

More than 100 labs across Europe participated in the European Robotics Remote Labs initiative to showcase their activities via the internet for everyone to see from anywhere in the world. Either pre-recorded videos or live-streaming cameras showed the labs' activities. "Robotics is cool, robotics is fun, robotics is the solution to many of the problems our world is facing", said Professor Stefano Stramigioli from University of Twente (Netherlands) and initiator of the European Robotics Remote Labs. "The European Robotics Week is a way to celebrate the success of European Robotics. The Remote Labs Initiative is one of the means to show everybody what we do."

Participating countries in the European Robotics Week: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom.

More information about the European Robotics Week and a full listing of all 203 events (sorted by country and date) at www.robotics-week.eu