The global robotics landscape has fundamentally shifted, driven by geopolitical tensions, supply chain vulnerabilities, and accelerating technological competition, with impact in Europe compounded by a lack of strategic focus. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and disruptions to international trade (e.g., through global pandemics, tariffs and trade barriers) have exposed critical dependencies and highlighted the urgent need to foster resilience and strategic autonomy through sustainable engagement and investment to strengthen European technological sovereignty.
How can we support and encourage the European polity to build on European robotics and create a competitive European robotics ecosystem? Geopolitical challenges require modernisation of production technologies, both for civil and defence applications. Creating manufacturing autonomy across key sectors is both a strategic and economic imperative.
Robotics is a key enabler for resilience in Europe. However, Europe currently lacks a comprehensive strategy for building a resilient robotics supply chain. We need to design innovative approaches to reduce Europe’s vulnerabilities, specifically through strategic collaborations that guarantee access to critical components.
Three critical factors are currently destabilizing the European robotics ecosystem:
- Europe currently lacks a strategic focus on robotics development. While Europe held a position of global leadership in robotics for decades, a shift in investment away from robotics has compromised this advantage. This diversion of resources has led to stagnating development cycles and a decline in innovation output, just as global demand for these technologies is accelerating.
- Europe is experiencing a loss of sovereignty in robotics and a widening competitive gap. Over the last two decades, the acquisition of major European robotics firms by non-European entities has eroded the continent’s control over critical technologies and institutional knowledge. Concurrently, aggressive long-term funding (e.g., DARPA and VC funding in the USA) and state-driven strategies in China have outpaced European development, creating a significant technological disparity. These factors, combined with supply chain dependencies on foreign hardware, now pose a direct threat to European strategic autonomy.
- Weak positioning of Europe in key strategic areas. There is an urgent need for Europe to establish a roadmap and concrete actions to ensure sustainable development across Europe’s key strategic sectors and industrial base, in line with the broader “landscape shift” driven by geopolitical, supply-chain, and security pressures. While domains such as defence, space, deep-sea exploration, critical raw material extraction, health systems, critical infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing are particularly exposed, the intent is not to prioritise a closed list but to anchor a coherent set of European priorities where robotics is mission-critical. In domains such as defence, space, deep-sea exploration, and critical material extraction, Europe currently trails the United States and China by decades. As robotics is the core enabler of these industries, Europe must foster a competitive ecosystem that attracts top talent and entrepreneurs capable of delivering disruptive inventions, while also rebuilding Europe-based manufacturing capacity to scale and deploy these technologies at speed. This modernization is essential for securing Europe’s resilience in an increasingly volatile global landscape, and should be aligned with the type of competitiveness and industrial roadmap agenda increasingly advocated at EU level for example by the Draghi report.
A Vision for Strategic Autonomy and Societal Value:
Our vision extends the scope of European robotics far beyond traditional manufacturing. We aim to secure Europe’s future by embedding robotics into the foundation of our critical infrastructure, logistics, defence, space exploration, and public health systems. Achieving this requires a new paradigm of collaboration between industry, government, and the public sector.
We want Europe to reclaim commercial leadership in robotics innovation and deployment, while setting a global benchmark for the responsible integration of dual-use technologies. That means aligning robotics with European values: security, sovereignty and environmental sustainability, while ensuring we can design, build, and scale these systems in Europe. In doing so, we will strengthen an ecosystem that is not only technologically advanced, but also resilient in the face of a changing world.
We envisage a Europe that reclaims commercial leadership in innovation and deployment, setting a global standard for the responsible integration of dual-use technologies. By aligning robotics solutions with European values—from security and sovereignty to environmental sustainability—we will foster an ecosystem that is not only technologically advanced but inherently resilient in the face of a changing world.
euRobotics Board of Directors, Tallinn December 2025.