Types of Experiments. As a third axes, the so-called type of an experiment was defined in order to categorize the experiment’s main contribution to future applications: – experiments of type joint enabling technology development aim at co- operative development of components or systems with the main focus on finding solutions for specific technical problems. – The experiment type application development covers experiments that create robust prototypes for standard tasks in new areas or new tasks in known areas. – The feasibility demonstration experiment type explores the possibility of applying robot technologies in completely new domains. These classifications took place during the proposal phase by a self-assessment of the proposers. For the funded experiments, the statistics of the assignment to scenarios, research foci, and experiment types are given in Table 2. The statistics clearly show that, for this specific funding scheme, smaller, individual problems as in the scenarios human-robot co-worker or the hyper-flexible cell are better suited than the complex scenario of a cognitive factory. After the selection of the experiments, other classification criteria turned out to be useful in addition to the ones mentioned before, namely the appli- cation area, concrete research topics, and technologies. This classification was only possible after the analysis of the successful experiment proposals, as the calls did not aim at restricting the ideas of the proposers. These additional classifications are shown in Fig. 5 and give a good impression of the variety of ECHORD’s research. Robotics technologies for medical application, for example, are of increasing interest, both scientifically and economically. Several ECHORD experiments address this application area, despite the fact that this could not be predicted at the time of the calls. Also, autonomous inspection and surveillance, often making use of unmanned aerial vehicles, is a developing field.
