The European Robotics Forum (ERF) 2026 officially opened on Monday in Stavanger, Norway. More than 80 exhibitors and hundreds of participants from the international robotics community have gathered this week in the Norwegian energy capital for three days of workshops, plenary sessions, hackathons and networking opportunities.
The opening address was delivered by Oussama Khatib, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Robotics Laboratory. Khatib, en route from San Francisco to India, stressed the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. He recalled the founding of what would become the ERF — then still known as Euron — more than a decade ago in Lyon, and noted the remarkable growth of the forum since then. “Robotics is really growing, and this time firmly. There is real potential for robotics to make a huge contribution to people and to our planet,” he said.
New leadership at euRobotics
A notable moment of the opening ceremony was the formal handover of the euRobotics presidency. Francesco Ferro, CEO and founder of PAL Robotics, was installed as the new president of euRobotics the previous evening, succeeding Bernd Liepert, who had led the association since 2008 — a total of eighteen years.
In his opening speech, Ferro outlined a political and economic climate that confronts the European robotics sector with difficult choices. He referenced a statement from the European Commission: Europe can no longer hold on to a world order that is gone and will not return. He pointed to intensifying geopolitical competition over semiconductors, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing, and argued that Europe must actively reposition itself. “We don’t have ready-made answers, but we do have the willingness to find them together,” Ferro said.
He reserved a personal tribute for Liepert, calling the signing of the SPARC partnership in 2015 a historic moment at which the European robotics ecosystem claimed its place at the centre of the global stage. Liepert accepted the award and remarked with some humour that after eighteen years he is now finally old enough to participate in the forum as a regular attendee.
Stavanger: from Viking port to robotics region
Anne Woie, Head of Economic Development and International Affairs for the City of Stavanger, represented the host city. She described Stavanger as a city with nine hundred years of history, which has evolved from a harbour and cathedral town into an international hub of 300,000 inhabitants representing nearly 180 nationalities. The city regularly ranks among the top three most liveable cities in the world for expatriates.
Woie highlighted the region’s deep roots in robotics. In 1969, forty minutes from the current conference venue, the first industrial painting robot was deployed — initially to spray wheelbarrows, a line of development that has since grown into what is now part of ABB Robotics, where some of the world’s most sophisticated automotive painting systems are developed. That same year also marks the discovery of the Ekofisk oil field, which will remain in production well beyond 2050.
SINTEF: robotics as a foundation for resilience and security
Alexandra Bech Gjørv, CEO of SINTEF for more than a decade and head of one of Europe’s largest independent research institutions, presented robotics explicitly as a strategic instrument for European resilience. She pointed to ageing infrastructure, talent shortages, extreme weather and geopolitical threats as factors compelling Europe to focus not only on prevention but also on recovery capacity.
“Competitiveness and security are no longer separate agendas. They are the same challenge, and robotics is the bridge between them,” Bech Gjørv said. SINTEF presented projects including autonomous inspection of power networks, underwater robots conducting mooring-chain inspections at 350-metre depths, and AI-assisted ship decommissioning for identifying hazardous materials. The recently established Norwegian Centre for Embodied AI, running until 2029, aims to develop autonomy that transfers across platforms — at sea, in the air and on land.
NORCE: from emergency preparedness to urban mining
Kristin Flornes, Executive Vice President Energy & Technology at NORCE, presented a broad range of applications in which robotics and autonomous systems contribute to societal resilience. She highlighted social digital twins that allow evacuation scenarios for tens of thousands of people to be tested without risk to real citizens — a tool already being piloted in Bergen, Bodø and Tromsø.
On the topic of raw materials, Flornes pointed to the iBOT project, which uses AI-driven robotics to recover critical materials from electronic waste. Norway generates an average of 28 kilos of e-waste per person per year — among the highest rates in the world — while less than one percent of rare earth elements are currently recycled. Urban mining, she argued, could become one of the pillars of Europe’s circular economy.
ERF 2026 runs from 24 to 27 March in Stavanger, Norway. The next edition is planned for the United Kingdom.
