Next week, the European Robotics Forum descends on Stavanger, Norway. Ahead of the event, Rocking Robots spoke with Nabil Belbachir, Research Director at NORCE, about what attendees can expect, and why robotics may be Europe’s most strategic investment right now.
When the European Robotics Forum heads north this year, it finds a fitting home. Stavanger, Norway’s offshore energy capital, is a city that has built its fortunes on extracting value from the sea, on bold engineering, and on looking beyond its own borders. These are themes that resonate with the conversations that ERF 2026 promises to spark.
For Nabil Belbachir, Research Director at NORCE (Norwegian Research Centre) and one of the organisers of the event, the choice of location is no coincidence. “The motto for Norway is basically exploring the ocean, the blue economy, and also space,” he explains. “We speak about offshore technologies, offshore businesses. It can be oil and gas, offshore wind, energy, fish farming. The sea is really very important for our transport, and subsea activities offer so many possibilities.”
But while the blue economy provides the backdrop for the week’s activities, with planned visits to fish farms and offshore facilities, the real agenda reaches far beyond Norway’s coastline. ERF 2026 arrives at a moment of heightened urgency for European technology policy, and Belbachir makes no bones about it: Europe is falling behind in areas it cannot afford to lose.
Three Pillars: Resilience, Reshoring, and an Ageing Society
According to Belbachir the top robotics themes on the robotics agenda are: resilience in supply chains, reshoring manufacturing, and the social consequences of an ageing population.
On resilience, he points to a structural vulnerability that too few policymakers are willing to confront head-on. “Europe is completely dependent on supply from Asia — around 90% of electronics come from there,” he says. “And when it comes to critical raw materials, Europe simply doesn’t have the reserves that Africa, Australia, Asia, or South America have.”
This is where robotics enters the picture in an unexpected but compelling way. Rather than simply accepting dependency, Belbachir advocates for what he calls “urban mining” — using robots to recover critical raw materials from waste electronics. “We are using electronics and then throwing them away, sending them to incineration, burning them, sending them to landfill — and there are enormous quantities of copper, aluminium, nickel and other critical materials just going to waste. Instead of mining new material from somewhere else, robots can help us recover what we already have.” The approach, he argues, could be both sustainable and economically viable, replacing low-wage manual sorting operations, most of them located in southern Europe, with intelligent, automated systems.
The second pillar concerns manufacturing. For decades, European companies have moved production to Asia and elsewhere in pursuit of lower labour costs. Reversing that trend is now a strategic imperative, but Belbachir is clear that it cannot happen without a new generation of robots. “You need much more developed robots that do more than just bin picking, also assembly, disassembly, inspection. Those are the capabilities Europe needs in order to be self-sustained in production.”
The third challenge is perhaps the most societal in nature: an ageing European workforce that is shrinking in sectors nobody wants to enter. “You have operation and maintenance of critical infrastructure and you don’t have people who want to climb a wind turbine or go underwater to clean a ship hull.” He singles out farming as a particularly acute example, gesturing admiringly towards the Netherlands. “The Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world despite its small size. It’s an impressive example of what automation and optimisation can achieve. But if you ask any young person today whether they want to work in poultry or aquaculture or agriculture, the answer is no. We need robots for the jobs people no longer want to do.”
Why Robotics Is Europe’s Strategic Priority
One of the arguments Belbachir plans to make at ERF concerns the current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence investment. While he acknowledges AI’s importance, he worries that Europe is being swept up in what he bluntly calls “a bubble.”
“Everyone is happy to pour billions into AI. But when you build an AI company, you are building a software service — you need a data server, great programmers, and some developer tools. You are not building a supply chain.” Robotics, he argues, is fundamentally different. “When you develop robots, you are working along the entire supply chain. You need materials, batteries, controllers, electronics, software, services. You need mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, battery specialists, materials scientists. You pull in so many sectors — and that makes your industrial ecosystem much more resilient.”
The irony, he notes, is that Europe actually has world-class robotics companies — or had them. “Kuka went to China. ABB went partly in a different direction. Universal Robots was bought by a US company. We are losing our robotics champions, just as we lost Qimonda.” This, he says, will be the central message he delivers in Stavanger: robotics is a strategic industrial pillar, not a niche technology sector, and it deserves the kind of long-term political commitment that has been lavished on other priorities.
He places robotics alongside biotechnology as an area of critical strategic importance. “We buy almost all our pharmaceutical raw materials from China, India, and Japan. We have almost no biotech manufacturing base in Europe. Robotics and biotech together could be the backbone of a genuinely sovereign European industrial policy.”
Space, Regulation, and the Entrepreneurship Gap
ERF 2026’s theme — “From Earth to Space” — brings another frontier into the conversation. Norway has a growing space sector, and Belbachir sees considerable potential for robotics in orbit: maintenance, operations, and infrastructure management in space. But here too, he sees Europe lagging.
“The US is the master of space, then Russia, then China. Europe is probably fifth or sixth.” The culprit, in his view, is not talent or ambition — it is regulation and bureaucracy. “It is much easier to start a company in the United States and get investment within a month. In Europe, by the time you’ve dealt with the compliance requirements, you’ve spent your seed capital on lawyers and paperwork rather than product development.”
He points to the EU AI Act as a cautionary case in point — well-intentioned regulation that risks driving innovative companies across the Atlantic before they have had the chance to prove themselves. “When a company starts, you need capital for development. If you put your money into bureaucracy instead, you lose. Those strict regulations need to be calibrated to the stage of a company’s development. Right now, they can kill companies before they even get started.”
Europe, he argues, needs its own version of the entrepreneurial ecosystems that produced SpaceX and its peers — and that means accepting a degree of regulatory flexibility for early-stage ventures that is currently absent.
See also
From Construction Robotics to Humanoids: What to Expect from ERF 2026 in Stavanger
