Last December the Annual Meeting of the EUROBENCH Project took place at the University of Heidelberg, were all the partners met during two days to make demonstrations about the work carried out within the project, to analyze the progress of the sub projects that are developing the test beds and software for the benchmarking facilities, as well as setting the basis for the next steps that EUROBENCH must face in the following months.
The meeting allowed all the partners discuss about all the points that the reviewers of the European Commision had advised to cover in order to improve the Project in the following tasks, at the first Review Meeting hold in September, as well as the key points that the Commisison remarked as favourable, like the transparent ranking made of the evaluated proposals. The reviewers were very optimistic about the results of EUROBENCH, although they gave us some advice such as reading the sound methodology “The lean startup” to guide us in the sustainability strategy. They were also very satisfied about the sensible aproach that EUROBENCH has taken due to the challenging ethics issues that the sub projects have proposed; in addition, EUROBENCH made a survey to acquire global acknowledge on the needs of the target population of the future benchmarking framework that pleased the reviewers as consequence of the major coverage reached and the appropriate taget population reached.
All the winning projects of the FSTP- 1, the first call for cascade funding are already underway. During the Meeting, they progress of each project was monitored since they must be built and integrated in the facilities during this year to be ready and fully functional to host the FSTP-2 winners by 2021. These selected candidates of the EUROBENCH FSTP-2 will be able to validate their robots at zero cost.
Furthermore, the most relevant points of the second call were discussed, whose complete information will be published soon. The call is expected to open this summer under the first-come-first-served scheme, so you must be the first to apply to win before the budget runs out!
