Harmonising automation: challenge-driven robotics and the making of Europe
Carlos Cuevas-Garcia, Benjamin Lipp, Federica Pepponia, Mathieu Baudrin · Science as Culture · 2026
Robotics and artificial intelligence are regularly framed as potential solutions to grand societal challenges such as climate change, staff shortages and demographic aging. The European Union has developed and deployed several challenge-oriented research and innovation policy instruments to support robotics development. One ambitious instrument called Public End-User Driven Technological Innovation (PDTI), aimed at defining and addressing challenges from the public sector using robots. Inspired in a preceding instrument called Pre-Commercial Procurement, the PDTI involved multi-stage and multi-consortia competitions focused on two scenarios: comprehensive geriatric assessment and sewer infrastructure inspection and clearance. By steering the interaction between robotics specialists and actors of these sectors across diverse European countries through a harmonised process, the PDTI simultaneously shaped, or co-produced, interdisciplinary research and European integration. However, the PDTI and its participants encountered difficulties throughout the process. The participants were less nationally diverse than the coordinators expected, and the process allowed multiple interpretations of what the end-users, challenges, solutions and market scales were. Moreover, due to its harmonised and competitive design, the process made little room for calibrating the instrument according to the diverse contexts of implementation. The analysis of the PDTI contributes to current debates in STS on the making of Europe and the contextual situatedness and coordination of interdisciplinary research. It shows how policy instruments guiding the interdisciplinary formulation of societal challenges are shaped by, but also contribute, to the objectives of European integration and harmonisation.