Marco van der Hoeven

Sarcos Robotics, developer of robots that augment humans to enhance productivity and safety, announced that it will become publicly listed through a merger transaction with Rotor Acquisition Corp., a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company.

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.1 trillion in 2021, an increase of 8.4% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. The source of funds for new digital business initiatives will more frequently come from business departments outside IT and charged as a cost of revenue or cost of goods sold (COGS).

Stratom, developer of autonomous ground vehicles and robotic systems for logistics and operational applications, has been awarded a contract with the U.S. Army’s DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC) to develop an autonomous ground vehicle refueling (AGVR) prototype system to integrate onto a Palletized Load System (PLS) flat rack for autonomous convoy operations.

Since July 2020, the 200 skips that collect Toulouse inhabitants’ waste from the 13 waste disposal centers managed by SUEZ have been equipped with embedded artificial intelligence. Under test since 2019, the ffly4u solution has been deployed with the objectives of reducing fuel consumption, optimizing skip flows and reducing costs by optimizing collection resources.

A team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has developed a new early warning system for vehicles that uses artificial intelligence to learn from thousands of real traffic situations. A study of the system was carried out in cooperation with the BMW Group. The results show that, if used in today’s self-driving vehicles, it can warn seven seconds in advance against potentially critical situations that the cars cannot handle alone – with over 85% accuracy.

In customer service it is important to achieve an equilibrium between automation and the human touch. A robot can be of great value. But there comes a point where humans provide the added value, and are able to prevent frustration by the customer. We talked about bots and customer service with Darren Parker,  Director EMEA Enterprise Customer Success at Zendesk. The key is the classic ‘know your customer’.

Boston Dynamics has revealed Stretch, its new box-moving robot designed to support the growing demand for flexible automation solutions in the logistics industry. This debut marks the company’s official entrance into warehouse automation, a fast-growing market fueled by increased demand in e-commerce.

ServiceNow has signed an agreement to acquire Intellibot, a robotic process automation (RPA) company based in Hyderabad, India. Intellibot extends ServiceNow’s core workflow capabilities by helping customers automate repetitive tasks for intelligent, end‑to‑end automation.

UiPath on Friday filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. No details of the target pricing or timing have been disclosed. Two months ago UiPath raised $750m in a round that valued it at $35bn. And last week it announced it had acquired Cloud Elements, to combine an enterprise-grade user interface (UI) and API-based automation capabilities in a single platform. 

According to the latest Canalys research, 3.5 million passenger cars worldwide were sold with level 2* autonomy driving features in Q4 2020, growing 91% year-on-year. Level 2 autonomy driving features were in 30% of new vehicles sold in the US, 20% in Japan, 19% in Europe and 12% in China. For the full-year 2020 11.2 million cars sold with level 2 features, a growth of 78% compared to 2019.