Dan Kara

Editor’s Note: Robotics Business Review’s coverage emphasizes innovation, including start-up companies (or ‘young’ companies). RBR “Start-Up Profiles” highlight individual start-up companies using a consistent, templated format that makes for quick, yet informed reading, that also simplifies comparative analysis. Veo Robotics – Company Profile City: Waltham State: Massachusetts Country: USA # of Employees: 49 URL: https://www.veobot.com/…

When inflexible automation collides with manufacturing trends requiring more flexibility, productivity suffers. Why? Manufacturing as currently practiced — with poor human-machine collaboration — is not sufficiently responsive to the long-term trends of shorter product life cycles and increasing product diversity.

With machine learning, algorithms are automatically generated from large datasets, speeding the development and reducing the difficulty of creating complex systems, including robotics systems. While data at scale is what makes accurate machine learning ‘go’, the data used to train ML models must also be very accurate and of high quality.

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have proven to increase the productivity and reduce the cost of warehouse automation operations. While the costs of AMRs continue to drop, even as their capabilities increase, there are often hidden, and sizable, costs associated with their deployment. Here’s what to look for, and how to mitigate their impact.

Robots and industrial automation enable disproportionate GDP gains, but are they resilient to disruptions and changing demands?

Increased automation—with its ability to significantly boost societal productivity—is needed to help modern nations address seemingly intractable challenges such as sluggish wage growth, aging populations, rising health care costs, environmental restorations, global competitiveness, and often-worrisome levels of public sector debt.

Monash University’s Dr. Nicole Robinson explains how social robots can play a role in diet and weight reduction without the need for human intervention.

Even before the advent of the Covid-19, autonomous mobile robot companies, notably those producing robots for use in e-commerce fulfillment centers, factories and warehousing, were experiencing a boom in investment. The pandemic is only accelerating investments in the AMR market.

The emergence and rapid proliferation of collaborative robots have resulted in the proliferation of a new class of ‘lean’ integrators specially adapted to the needs of SMEs who wish to leverage automation. The lean integrator has evolved precisely to deliver robot installations that yield higher productivity at a lower price point, and that can be installed in a fraction of the time of a traditional robot work cell.

New research by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu shows that since 1987, automation has taken away jobs from lower-skill workers without being replaced by an equivalent number of labor-market opportunities.

Cloud computing represents the most important horizontal innovation for the robotics industry to date, with the market for robot-related services powered by cloud computing reaching US$157.8 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

Both China and the US are incorporating AI into their industrial manufacturing operations… China from the top down and the US from the bottom up.

For startups, including hardware centric, robotics companies, securing outside financing is essential to reach their commercial potential and continue to expand. In this comprehensive review, a popular source of start-up funding, venture capital, where capital is exchanged for equity, is examined.

Interact Analysis’ Rueben Scriven reviews the grocery warehouse automation market in the context of Ocado, and discusses the likely impact of COVID-19 on the growth potential of the company and the sector overall.

Recent advances in machine and deep learning have improved SLAM techniques, leading to an increased richness in maps, with semantic scene understanding improving localization, mapping quality and robustness.

For robotics systems, “supervised autonomy”, readily available for implementation today, can be used as a bridging solution between teleoperation and full autonomy.

Qualcomm Robotics’ industry partners signing on for RB5 platform citing high end compute, edge AI, 5G and more.

Qualcomm Robotics’ RB5 platform offers high end compute, edge AI, 5G and more for robotics developers.

Softbank’s most promising robotics investments are not those targeting the experimental technologies, nor the massive funding rounds for self-driving vehicles, but rather the mid-range investments in mobile robots for industrial and commercial applications.

Labor shortages and high levels of workplace injury and illness have always challenged the food manufacturing sector, especially meat producers. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation. Robotics automation provides a solution.

Designers and engineers require prototypes to verify product design and manufacturability and engineering, before moving on to full production. But how can start-ups and smaller companies, who lack the high level of resources and expertise of larger firms, rapidly develop their prototypes? Outsourcing provides one solution.

Industrial Robot’s Joanne Pransky interviews the CEO of AMP Robotics, a company that automates the identification, sorting and processing recycled waste material.

Robotics solutions can be used automate difficult and dangerous tasks in the utilities sector.

A new study co-authored by an MIT economist Daron Acemoglu shows firms that move quickly to use robots tend to add workers to their payroll, while industry job losses are more concentrated in firms that make this change more slowly.

LogisticsIQ expects the overall revenues from the Warehouse Automation Market to increase from US $13 billion in 2018 to reach US $27 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 11.7% (2019 to 2025).