A smart city uses technologies to enhance quality and performance of urban services, and to engage more effectively and actively with its citizens. The European Union (EU) has developed a range of programmes under ‘Europe’s Digital Agenda’.

Socially intelligent Robots, being smart and connected machines with a range of capabilities, are becoming inevitable part of sustainable and connected intelligence of smart city ecosystem, whether it is smart home, smart public place, smart hospitals, smart shopping malls, smart museum or smart parks. Such robots are serving and adapting their roles in a Smart City’s mixed population for the well being of citizen, and to elevate their quality of life and experience.

On the other hand, smart cities as end users are unique, trustworthy and appropriate context for a robust implementation of a business, social and scientific strategy aiming at accelerating acceptance, development/deployment of socially intelligent robots.

However, unfortunately the robotics community at large, except relatively few robotics stakeholders involved in smart city/smart environment related projects, is unaware about such practical societal applications, use cases and challenges of Intelligent robots.

Therefore, there is a great need to connect robotics and smart cities. This will facilitate and bring some real use cases of societal applications of the robot and reinforce the message of robotics that it is around the centrality of the citizen of Europe.

In this regard, the proposed workshop aims to:

(i) Bring awareness through different stakeholders to share their experiences and ideas at the cross-section of Intelligent Robots and Smart Cities

(ii) Create a common ground and perception of Smart Cities within Robotics community

(iii) Brainstorm from Commercial Innovation, Technical and R&D points of view, the challenges and future applications

(iv) Build a basis for networking among the stakeholders from smart cities and Robotics.

Instead of going in very deep, the workshop aims to provide a bigger global picture, for common interest and explore Smart City as a mean to enforce direct-to-consumer strategy for Intelligent Robots’ societal applications.

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