Bots & Business

Robotic startup Aziobot, which has been funded by the Rockstart-program, has recently moved to the Brainport Campus in Eindhoven. In this inspiring environment it will further develop both hardware and software of the Aziobot cleaning robot. Rocking Robots talked to CEO and co-founder Sarthak Yadav about his vision on robotics and the role of robots in business.

Salesforce has announced it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Servicetrace, a provider of robotic process automation (RPA), which, upon closing of the acquisition, will become a part of MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022, ending October 31, 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.

Despite a lot of imaginative fiction most robots still don’t fully understand the world around them at a deep level. They can be programmed to back up when bumping into a chair, but they can’t recognize what a chair is or know that bumping into a spilled soda can will only make a bigger mess. To help researchers to build more intelligent real-world robots Facebook has developed the open-sourced droidlet platform.

Gartner identified the top five business trends that will impact the global manufacturing sector in 2021. These trends will drive business disruption and widen opportunities for manufacturers. Gartner predicts that by 2025, the top 50 consumer goods manufacturers will have invested in a brand app using AI, embedded technology in the product, videos as a digital asset and/or integrated innovation with IT and R&D teams.

inVia Robotics, provider of warehouse automation robots, has secured a $30 million Series C funding round from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, and Qualcomm Ventures LLC. The two firms are also joined by Hitachi Ventures (the strategic corporate venture arm of Hitachi, Ltd.) and inVia Robotics’ existing investors (Point 72, Upfront, and Embark). To date, inVia has raised $59 million from strategic funders committed to the company’s growth.

The past year OnRobot unlocked several new markets with its collaborative robot solutions. The pandemic led to new industries discovering robotics, food with disrupted supply chains to pharmaceuticals with increased production combined with enhanced safety. Rocking Robots talked to Vikram Kumar, General Manager DACH & Benelux at OnRobot about the strategy of his company.

How advertising giant Dentsu’s using RPA to “elevate our people’s potential and enable them to do the creative, strategic, and high value work that provides value to clients”

Dentsu, one of the world’s largest advertising agency networks, will migrate to the UiPath Automation Cloud to deliver automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities at scale across its enterprise. This move is in line with Dentsu’s automation and AI strategic vision to elevate its employees’ potential by integrating automation and AI into internal processes as well as client-facing services.

Analytics Insight has announced ‘Top Robotics Companies at the Forefront of Innovation in 2021’. They describe ten robotics companies leveraging disruptive technologies to transform different industries from healthcare and manufacturing to defence and education. According to the researchers these companies have evolved beyond their boundaries and showed significant growth through their efforts in R&D, new initiatives, product launches thereby playing a key role to channelize global industries.

The CFO Automation Experience is an independent Round Table, where CFOs and practitioners freely discuss automation. Recently a new edition was organized by founder Armand Angeli, in which the benefits and challenges of robotization in the finance function were the main topic. “The RPA journey of the company is the RPA journey of the individual employees as well.”