Marco van der Hoeven

The automotive industry has the largest number of robots working in factories around the world: Operational stock hit a new record of about one million units. This represents about one third of the total number installed across all industries, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).

End-to-end, no-code multi-cloud management application platform emma, today announces that it has raised $6 million in Seed funding in a round led by RTP Global, with participation from AltaIR Capital and CircleRock Capital.

‘We want them to come back to the robot community in Odense’, say both Christian Schlette and Morten Nielsen in this Rocking robots videoreport from ERF 2023. This major European robotics event was hosted last week in Denmark, receiving over 1,200 participants from academia, government and business.

The future of robotics is intelligent machines, working together with and augmenting the skills of humans. Marco van der Hoeven reports on the trends at ERF 2023, which is hosted this week at Odense , Denmark.

Yesterday Teradyne CEO Greg Smith addressed the audience at ERF 2023 in a keynote, highlighting the role robotics companies Universal Robots and MiR, both acquired by Teradyne in recent years, play in the strategy of the US-based technology company. With currently 11 million cobots that could be sold, the potential market for cobots is around $500 billion.

Marie Bjerre, the Danish Minister for Digital Government and Gender Equality, was the first keynote speaker at the European Robotics Forum held in Odense, Denmark. In her speech, the minister highlighted the rapid pace of technological advancement and the crucial role played by the robotics and artificial intelligence industries in transforming the way we live and work.

At the beginning of the European Robotic Forum 2023 the mayor of Odense, Peter Rahbæk Juel, highlighted the impact the robotics industry has had on his community. At a reception in Odense City Hall he said that the robotics cluster gives employment to 4,600 people, and already comprises an ecosystem of 130 companies.

In recent years, the integration of robots into the workplace has become increasingly prevalent. Nadine Reißner, Senior UX Researcher at KUKA, believes that it is time to put the human into focus in the development of robot technologies. For this, one important part is to consider  the impact of human-robot interaction on the human. In a workshop at the European Robotics Forum she presents the consortium’s initial findings on this topic.

Microsoft Germany has announced that GPT-4 will be released this week, according to the company’s CTO, Andreas Braun. The announcement was made during an event called “AI in Focus – Digital Kickoff” last week. The event focused on large language models (LLMs) like GPT, and their potential to disrupt companies, as well as Microsoft’s Azure-OpenAI offering.

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) announced two longtime industry leaders as the winners of the 2023 Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Awards, the world’s most prestigious robotics honor.