Part startup/investor mixer, part public showcase, part industry/academic workshop, part hackathon, the Skolkovo International Robotics Conference has its sights on becoming the largest robotics gathering in Europe. Held March 20-22 at the Hypercube on the Skolkovo campus outside Moscow, the event drew over one thousand visitors – this despite the campus largely being a construction site in the middle of a semi-forested area a 40 minute drive from Moscow city centre.
“Our goal is not to be a scientific conference, but to bring talent, money and startup companies together to search for a new generation of ideas,” says Skolkovo Chief Roboticist Albert Efimov, who brought more than 50 speakers from six countries to the event.
Skolkovo Robotics is part of the Skolkovo Innvoation Center, a state-financed tech incubator that is currently home to about 1K startups spread across several tech clusters including IT, biomed, space, nuclear and energy efficient technologies. The Innovation Center is the entrepreneurial-facing branch of the Skolkovo Foundation, a double-sided institution that also administers Skoltech University.
“We are building a city,” says Skolkovo Vice President of Public Relations Alexandra Barschevskaya. Building plans for the technopark include social infrastructure like housing, hotels, shopping, and even onsite schools for the children of Skolkovo’s faculty, students and entrepreneurs. “Participants of Skolkovo (SK) will have access to housing and facilities for a period of ten years, to give them time to organize their science and their business, and then they will move on to make room for the next generation.” The grand vision, which is the brainchild Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and has support from the highest levels of government, is to jumpstart the Russian economy by nurturing technology that will create export opportunities at an international level.
Russia has a long history developing military robotics – according to Efimov, its first military application was during the Soviet-Finnish war in the 1940s delivering explosions to the enemy’s heavily fortified points of defence – and its current fleet of firefighting robots is a testament to its ongoing efforts to remain a global leader in this area. “But how many firefighting robots can you sell?” asks Efimov.
This article appeared in Robohub.org and can be viewed in its entirety here.