Marco van der Hoeven

UK industrial workplaces have automated far fewer processes than most other countries and are significantly below the global average for robot adoption. Every day, UK workers spend a lot of time and effort on internal logistics. Now, a number of robotics experts in the UK have come together to show how UK manufacturing can become more competitive through the automation of manual tasks. Learn more in the upcoming online event for interested parties across the UK.

Recently the CFO Automation Experience (CFOAX) organized the webinar State of Finance Transformation. At this event, research by the Business School of the University of Amsterdam was presented on the state of the digital transformation in finance according to executives from all over Europe.

Collect&Go, Colruyt Group’s online shopping service, is currently testing a vehicle built by the Estonian technology company Clevon that combines remote teleoperation with advanced autopilot functionality. The aim is to find out what such a vehicle can mean for Collect&Go in a rapidly changing e-commerce context.

FastPath Automation (FPA), the Intelligent Automation and RPA division of CoSo Netherlands, today announced a partnership with work graph company Soroco. Through this partnership, FPA will integrate Soroco’s Scout, a work graph platform, into its business solutions.

Search and Destroy, is the mission of LANIUS, a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition by Elbit Systems. The robot is designed for short-range operation in the urban environment, and can autonomously scout and map buildings and points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. LANIUS can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.

Last week the City of Amsterdam received the 2022 Softbot Award for their innovative use of RPA. This award celebrates innovation in automation, with a broad spectrum of use cases from both public and private sector.  “A few years ago, RPA was mainly seen as a technology with which organizations started experimenting on a small scale. Now we see that we are in discussion at board level about organizing organizations differently with intelligent process automation.”

Last week, the fifth edition of the National Cobot Day took place at Olmia in Tiel. Visitors could network and exchange knowledge about the rapidly growing cobot market in a relaxed atmosphere. ‘We see that robots are not used to replace people, but to enable them to do other, more challenging work.’

Robotics startups can struggle to get the help needed to turn great ideas into successful businesses. That’s why leading investors and companies from Denmark’s robotics industry and prominent commercial foundations have joined forces to establish a fund that will provide robotics and drone startups with the support they need – for generations to come.  

At Project Convergence 2022 (PC22) Kraus Hamdani Aerospace introduced its newest offering, the upSwarm “Skynet* for good” system in conjunction with a demonstration for the K1000ULE, the world’s longest endurance fully electric zero emissions autonomous unmanned aircraft in its size and weight category.

A new Gartner survey revealed that 87% of business leaders expect to increase their organisation’s investment in sustainability over the next two years. Customers are the primary stakeholder group creating pressure for organisations to invest or act on sustainability issues, selected by 80% of executives, followed by investors (60%) and regulators (55%).