Marco van der Hoeven

The Army of the future will involve humans and autonomous machines working together to accomplish the mission. According to Army researchers, this vision will only succeed if artificial intelligence is perceived to be ethical.

Annual installations of industrial robots more than tripled within ten years (2010-2019) reaching 381 thousand units in factories around the world. The International Federation of Robotics shows top 5 trends shaping industries around the globe. “The mission to combine traditional production with ´go digital strategies´ puts robots in a pole position,” says Dr Susanne Bieller, General Secretary of the IFR.

The worldwide low-code development technologies market is projected to total $11.3 billion in 2021, an increase of 23.2% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. The surge in remote development during the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to boost low- code adoption, despite ongoing cost optimisation efforts.

Teradyne today announced that Kim Povlsen has been appointed President of Universal Robots. Povlsen, a Danish native, brings global executive leadership from a high-tech and commercial perspective and will lead Universal Robots’ next stage of growth and innovation. His appointment reinforces Teradyne´s commitment to Universal Robots’ Danish origin and its role in further developing the local robotics community. Kim begins his new role at Universal Robots on March 1, 2021.

According to Russian press agency TASS the Moscow police force uses a facial recognition system to detect participants in demonstrations against the government. The system is said to detected those who had been put on a database for their repeated participation in ‘unauthorized events’.

Customer contact must deal with a fairly complex ecosystem of fragmented data across different sources. To manage this mission critical ecosystem, a robot can play an essential role and eliminate challenges like fragmented data and delivering personalization. And above all, to eliminate the frustration a lot of customers experience (CX) in their dealings with companies: ‘30% of a total call duration is silent time.’

Self-driving car company Aurora has announced a global and strategic collaboration with Toyota and Denso to build and globally deploy self-driving cars at scale. It engineering teams will develop and test driverless-capable vehicles equipped with the Aurora Driver. And it is to lay the groundwork for the mass-production, launch, and support of these vehicles with Toyota on ride-hailing networks, including Uber’s, over the next few years.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, more than one-in-ten workers will seek to trick artificial intelligence (AI) systems used to measure employee behaviour and productivity. Such systems have seen a significant uptick in use in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Later this week the Bank of the Future/Automation in Banking will be the theme of The Banking Scene Afterwork-seminar. One of the presenters is Sidney Madison Prescott, VP Global Intelligent Automation initiative at music streaming powerhouse Spotify. Recently she also spoke about her experiences in automation and RPA at the UiPath reboot Work Festival.

Robots from Blue Ocean-daughter UVD Robots have helped disinfect One Buc Place, the facility of the Tampa Bay Bucccaneers, winners of the Super Bowl. The robots were deployed by Tampa-based company ip Program Infection Prevention in cooperation with Tampa General Hospital.