Service Robotics is the branch of robotics aiming at the development of robots able to assist humans in their environment.

Service robots are going to be the major application field for technologies developed by the autonomous robot research community. Service robots must be designed to interact with people, so human-robot interaction technologies are crucial for service robotics. An important ability they will have is the capability to entertain and play with humans. In a word they can be "companions" to humans with specialized abilities.

Possible applications for service robots will be to assist elderly people or to allow parents to stay close to their children through telepresence, or they can act as physical avatars for virtual meetings. Moreover, they may be used for surveillance and security within houses or company buildings.

The purpose of this Robotics Research Campus is to facilitate the integration of different research activities in order to foster the development of commercial service robots. Research topics such as autonomous navigation, object and people recognition, human-robot interaction, object manipulation, ethical issues, and many others, currently treated as separate independent problems, have to be combined in order to produce effective solutions to achieve effective robots.

Robots are about to move out of the research lab and enter into our everyday life, more or less like computers did in the early 1980s.   Progress depends on supporting the enablers for this transition, and this is what we are about.

	Cloud robotics: connect robots to a cloud computing and allow robots to off-load more computationally intensive tasks and even originate a more flexible and cooperative machine learning mechanism. Application Store: adopt standards and robots architecture to provide a common framework for developers of robotic services, functionalities and capability 'Hw independent".
Identify and set up a community with university, research institutes and companies to sharing and developing common interest solutions. Real applications: important focus on the dissemination and transfer of technology.

More information can be found in the Service Robotics web page.