EuROBIN is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program and brings together 31 academic and industrial partners from 14 countries. The demonstration in Brussels was the culmination of several days of a hackathon, during which participants worked through household, industrial, and logistics scenarios.
The venue featured robots on legs, wheels, with arms and grippers, and four service machines showed how to clear a table, load a dishwasher, and wipe a surface. These tasks were meant to show not speed, but the ability of machines to work alongside people and perform everyday actions.
One of the most notable exhibits was Transformer, a development by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland. It is a wheeled quadruped that can transform into a bipedal robot; one of its creators said the machine was assembled in five months from components manufactured in Switzerland.
Another demonstration showed how three robots from different countries, by voice command, disassembled water pumps, computer screens, and batteries. The artificial intelligence interface acted as a “conductor”.
The reason for the comparison was the Beijing robot sports games, where in August Chinese humanoids, most often remotely controlled, demonstrated records as well as their limitations. Researcher Serena Ivaldi of the French institute Inria in Nancy called the spectacle impressive “like when a Formula 1 car drives past you”, but reminded that in everyday life safety around people matters more than speed.
Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Technology Ethics at Sorbonne University in France Raja Chatila said that working with the environment is more difficult than simply running, jumping, or rolling fast, because robots need perception, planning, manipulation, and situation recognition. He also believes that Europe invests significantly less in this sector than China or the US, although it is right to focus on coordination and understanding practical tasks.
MEP from the CDU, Germany, Axel Voss called the day a choice between watching a new industrial revolution and shaping it, and recalled the purchase of the German company Kuka by a Chinese company in 2016. EuROBIN head Aline Albu-Schäffer from the German Aerospace Center said that in ten years Europe could lose 20 million workers, while the consortium itself is aiming for 33% of the global robot market and for greater funding, including part of the 175 billion euros that the European Commission proposed for the Horizon Europe budget for 2028–2034.
EuROBIN also points to pressure from China’s Unitree, whose humanoids cost less than 10,000 euros and, as noted in the article, less than the European materials for their assembly. The director of the Spanish company Pal, Luca Marchionni, says it is hard to understand the economics of such robots, and investors have already reacted to Unitree’s stock market debut in early August, after which the company lost half its value.
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