Overview and useful information for the public

As PILLAR-Robots enters its final months, stakeholder involvement has become an important part of the project’s overall balance. Since the beginning, the project has aimed not only to advance research on purposeful autonomous robots, but also to connect this work with organisations able to provide external perspectives, practical feedback and possible routes for future use.

This has been especially relevant because PILLAR-Robots works across 3 application domains: post-harvesting agri-food, edutainment, and SME industry and retail. In these areas, the contribution of stakeholders helps relate scientific and technological work to real needs, sectoral expectations, validation opportunities and future adoption contexts.

A stakeholder community around PILLAR-Robots

During the project, PILLAR-Robots has developed a structured stakeholder community with different levels of involvement.

The project has reached:

Level of involvement	Main activities	Number of stakeholders	Form of involvement
Initial	Communication, dissemination and exploitation activities	164	Consent to share basic information
Intermediary	Use cases, impact assessment, communication, dissemination and exploitation	35	Individual letters of intent identifying areas of interest
Advanced	Use cases, impact assessment, communication, dissemination, exploitation and possible continuation beyond the project	13	Business or collaborative agreements, and associated forms of cooperation

These figures show that stakeholder engagement in PILLAR-Robots has combined broad outreach with more focused and formalised collaboration. Initial stakeholders have helped extend the project’s visibility and community. Intermediary stakeholders have expressed specific areas of interest. Advanced stakeholders have established closer cooperation with the consortium.

Why stakeholder involvement matters

Stakeholders have helped the consortium look at the project from outside the research environment. Their contribution is important for understanding whether the concepts, demonstrators and results developed in PILLAR-Robots are relevant beyond the project itself.

Their involvement supports several objectives: gathering technical feedback, identifying practical needs, considering possible adoption barriers, assessing ethical and societal implications, and exploring future opportunities for research, innovation or exploitation.

This external perspective is particularly valuable in a project dealing with purposeful lifelong open-ended autonomy, where scientific ambition must be connected with realistic application contexts and with the expectations of different actors.

The role of intermediary users

PILLAR-Robots has placed particular emphasis on what may be described as intermediary users. These are organisations that do not necessarily act as direct end-users of the technology, but can serve as bridges between research results and future application contexts.

This category includes technology integrators, sector consultants, research and technology organisations, universities, industry associations, technology clusters, public bodies and other networks able to support validation, dissemination or adoption.

This approach has allowed the project to go beyond a narrow end-user perspective. It has also helped assess how project results could be understood, adapted or further developed in operational, industrial, educational or research settings.

Main areas of contribution

Stakeholder involvement has been connected to several parts of the project.

In the use cases, stakeholders have contributed to activities related to agri-food, edutainment, and SME industry and retail. Their input has helped identify relevant contexts, practical issues and possible validation perspectives.

In the impact assessment work, stakeholders have provided views relevant to operational, social, ethical, legal and market-related considerations.

In communication, dissemination and exploitation, stakeholders have helped expand the project’s reach, identify relevant audiences and explore possible future paths for the results. In some cases, stakeholder involvement has also opened the door to cooperation beyond the project itself, through collaborative agreements, future research links or potential adoption routes.

How feedback has been gathered

PILLAR-Robots has used different ways to gather stakeholder feedback, including interviews, focus groups, surveys and direct observation during project activities.

The purpose has not been only to collect general opinions, but to understand how project results may be perceived in realistic contexts. This includes technical feasibility, usability, scalability, possible benefits, adoption barriers and broader societal implications.

This feedback has supported the project during its development and is also relevant for its final assessment.

Looking beyond the project

As the project approaches its formal closure, stakeholder involvement provides a useful perspective on what PILLAR-Robots has achieved and on how its results may continue to generate value.

The stakeholder community created around the project can help maintain links between robotics research, industry, public organisations, research institutions and other innovation actors. These links may support future projects, larger-scale demonstrations, sector-specific developments or new research collaborations.

In this sense, stakeholder involvement in PILLAR-Robots has not been limited to dissemination. It has contributed to validation, impact assessment, exploitation thinking and the preparation of possible continuity after the end of the project.