Our Mission

The advancement of education and science for the public benefit in the field of robotics and associated technologies.

Purpose

  • To support initiatives to create a sustainable service robotics community for the public benefit.
  • To undertake education and research in cooperation with international roboticists to reduce duplication of effort through encouraging modularisation.
  • To support international robot standardisation activities to facilitate the development of new robot markets.
  • To provide mechanisms and channels of communication to increase the flow of information on robotics to technical experts as well as the lay people through sponsoring, or co-sponsoring events, e-events, producing publications and organising activities with the media for the public benefit.

History

CLAWAR was set up with funding from the EC as a Network of Excellence (NoE) focussing on Climbing and walking robots in February 1998 following a 6 month exploratory phase in 1996 to identify key stakeholders in the area of robotics at the EU level.

The first phase of CLAWAR was during 1998-2002 and it was coordinated by University of Portsmouth with Professor Gurvinder S Virk as the Project Manager. The mission of CLAWAR 1 was to bring all stakeholders together in the CLAWAR area of technology to widen the application of mobile robotics with 22 key organisations active in robotics R&D. The first CLAWAR conference was held in Brussels during 1998. CLAWAR 2 was a follow on and extension project during 2002-2005; CLAWAR 2 was coordinated by University of Leeds and comprised 38 organisations from Europe and over 40 observer organisations from throughout the world. CLAWAR 2 started addressing global issues for robotics and included modularity, societal and commercialisation and helped initiate ISO robot standardisation activities to assist the emergence of new robot markets for non-industrial sectors aimed at delivering a wide variety of services.

CLAWAR 2 ended in 2005 and CLAWAR Association Ltd was set up in March 2006 as a non-profit making membership based organisation registered in the UK at Companies House. The aim was to focus on activities to encourage the widening of the robot market sector by supporting international ISO/IEC robot standardisation activities in the emerging areas of service robots (personal and medical robots). CLAWAR Association was awarded charitable status in April 2012 and is currently registered as a charity in the UK. CLAWAR Association Limited is a UK Registered Charity with the Charity Commission (Number 1146747) and is Company Limited by Guarantee (Registration No. 5730036) with Companies House.