Georges Giralt PhD Award

The Georges Giralt PhD Award is a European scientific prize for extraordinary contributions in robotics. It is yearly awarded at the European Robotics Forum by euRobotics AISBL, a non-profit organisation based in Brussels with the objective to turn robotics beneficial for Europe’s economy and society.[1][2][3][4][5]

The trophy of the Georges Giralt PhD Award represents one part of the SPARC logo

Georges Giralt received his PhD in 1958, from the Paul Sabatier University, in the domain of electrical machines, and soon afterwards became a pioneer in robotics, in Europe and worldwide. He was especially instrumental in bringing in scientific foundations and methodology when the domain was still young, and a loose coupling of mechanical and electrical engineering, adopting the early results of automatic control.

The high reputation of the Georges Giralt PhD Award is based on the prominent role of the awarding institution euRobotics. With more than 250 member organisations,[6] euRobotics represents the academic and industrial robotics community in Europe. Moreover, it provides the European robotics community with a legal entity to engage in a public/private partnership with the European Commission.[7][8][9]

Entitled for participation for the Georges Giralt PhD Award are all robotics-related dissertations which have been successfully defended at a European university.

The US-American counterpart is the Dick Volz Award.