ERC Pro formula is addressed to start-ups, industry, research groups and professionals in the broader field of space robotics. The ERC Pro formula gives young professionals and non-space actors unique possibilities both due to mutual inspiration regarding innovative solutions in space technologies, robotics, automation, etc. as well as support in starting international cooperation, presenting their constructions to potential investors or commercialising some technological solutions. For the university teams this is an excellent opportunity to have a direct exchange towards knowledge transfer and commercialisation. This meetup is also experiencing increased interest from companies and institutions operating in the international space sector, especially the PERASPERA Cluster being the European effort to build together competences and technologies for space robotics domain. All towards one goal – bringing continuous, incremental development to space robotics domain. The expression of interest and participation in the ERC 2019 Pro formula is still open.

ERC Pro is a meetup of established and aspiring actors of space robotics domain. It aims to get together environment of ‘doers’ providing opportunity to demonstrate abilities and concepts in solving field tasks inspired by space robotics roadmaps. It is suited for start-ups, any companies, research groups and others working in space robotics domain. On the other hand, those not yet connected with space industry and having solutions fulfilling identified gaps can benefit from participation by presenting their strengths and getting introduced to the domain challenges and community of this specific field.

In a long term ERC Pro want to provide platform for monitoring and benchmarking developments fulfilling robotic exploration roadmaps and beyond. As a implication of aforementioned goals, ERC Pro is aspiring to disrupt pattern of single-mission systems and following best practices form terrestrial robotics, bring iterative development and improvement in field of space robotics projects by annual trials and demonstrations.

Both, ERC Student and ERC Pro, tracks are the part of one community network managed under European Rover Challenge flag. Such solution provides unique opportunity to collect people on different level of career focused on robotics and space exploration. The community drives continuous improvement effort providing transfer of expertise and feedback from professional teams to young professionals and others but also creating transfer of talents to ambitious industry. It promotes strengths and opportunities for collaboration between members.

Benefits of ERC Pro

What you can get by joining ERC Pro:

• environment of ‘doers’ with passion for planetary robotics and special guests influencing and guiding this domain all collected at one venue
• ‘powerspeach’ presentations – workshop style sessions of short presentations closed by summarizing panels
• opportunity to demonstrate and benchmark projects in roadmaps inspired scenarios at comfortable and affordable venue with organised logistics
• occasion for non-space robotic groups and companies to join space robotics community with technical and business support and guidance from professionals.
• direct contact with cohort of highly ambitious young professionals
• inspiration by tens of different students designs collected in one place with their creators and focused on solving particular challenge tasks
• access to community of proactive people working on shaping movement towards incremental improvement in space robotics
• extension of the field of expertise and experience in the tasks inspired by long term customers roadmaps (agencies, governments etc.)
•  development of task oriented use cases and interfaces that can be later used in space and earth applications
• leverage for system level awareness and lightweight project management approach experience across team members on different levels of engagement and different specialisations
• boost of creativity and innovation by solving different-than-everyday-work problems in failure-tolerant environment
• lot of fun and team building opportunities around ambitious goals by challenging teams to build/prepare existing hardware and software to specific challenge tasks

In exchange ERC community aims to motivate you to:

• show continuous engagement in shaping the efforts – during the event and beyond
• actively participate in demonstration trials – bringing your system (hardware or software) which is capable of solving presented tasks or subset of their elements
• show proactive attitude and long lasting engagement towards community values and goals
• help ERC reach wider audience of students and professionals

Interested in taking part in ERC Pro? Please send your expression of interest (demo film or your project description) to the Contact Point: pro@roverchallenge.eu

The European Rover Challenge is owned and coordinated by European Space Foundation, organised in cooperation with group of independent experts creating steering and jury boards. Mars Society Polska is a partner of the programme.