Yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s challenging and dynamic economic environment forces European high-end manufacturing industry to focus on high flexibility, high quality, reliability and low life-cycle costs and to respond quickly to changes in this environment. The high-end manufacturing industry requests production systems that can quickly switch between diverse machining operations with short changeover, programming and set-up times without compromising quality, reliability or life-cycle costs. From a conceptual point of view, industrial robot technology could provide an excellent base for machining being both flexible (due to their lay-out) and cost efficient (robots cost 2-5 times less then machine tools). However, industrial robots lack absolute positioning accuracy (1), are unable to react in real time to changing process conditions (2) and lack reliable programming and simulation tools to ensure first time right machining once production commences (3). These three critical limitations prevent industrial robots from being integrated in high-end machining processes. The COMET consortium will provide a revolutionary Plug-and-Produce solution enabling the use of industrial robots for high end machining processes, appreciating the needs from the manufacturing industry for cost effective, flexible and reliable manufacturing solutions. The proposed solution will be on the average 30% more cost effective than dedicated machine tools whilst delivering absolute positional accuracy of at least 50 µm. Due to the sense of urgency in Europe’s manufacturing industry the COMET consortium defined an ambitious work plan of only 30 months to develop and demonstrate the innovations planned and meet the objectives set. These ambitious goals and the planned dissemination and training activities encourage a quick uptake by the manufacturing industry. Over a 5 years period, the estimated impact is 45M€ to 50M€ justifying the investment from the EC and the COMET partnership.