People in Robotics

Annette Maier has a sucessful career in technology of over 20 years in general management. She was Sales Director Software Germany at HP, Vice President Germany at VMware, Managing Director Google Cloud Germany and since 2021 she is Area Vice President Central and Eastern Europe at UiPath. Dr Harald Karcher sat down with her to discuss trends in automation.

Processing hundreds of thousands to millions of documents can take a lot of time. Computers, however, are very capable of reading, understanding and processing documents. The Groningen-based firm Klippa develops specialised AI-based software to help companies automate administrative work, so that employees can focus on tasks that add more value and are more rewarding.

Head of Finance at Unilever in the Nordics, Alexey Pavlov, works with a team of 35 finance and data specialists, serving a Nordic organisation with approx. 400 employees in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. To drive Unilever’s business, the team converts data into insights by identifying processes that are very complex and highly repetitive.

At the European Robotics Forum (ERF), which kicked off yesterday in Rotterdam, a broad range of topics related to robotics was discussed by representatives of science, business and public sector. In this interview with Rocking robots Bernd Liepert, president of euRobotics, discusses trends in robotics, the world class robotics start-up ecosystem in Europe and the crucial role of SMB.

The Executive Board of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) has elected Marina Bill of ABB as its new President. Kenji Yamaguchi of FANUC appointed as IFR´s new Vice President.

‘We are at the beginning of a big explosion of robotics’, says Melonee Wise of Zebra Technologies in this report from Automatica in Munich. This week she received the  ‘Nobel Prize’ of robotics, the 2022 Engelberger Award for her contributions to robotics technology. The award is bestowed by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3).

Yesterday Universal Robots unveiled their newest cobot, the UR20, at Automatica 2022.  Afterwards Rocking Robots talked to president Kim Povlsen on the challenges this cobot is addressing, and his vision on the rapidly growing cobotmarket.

Automation is technology, but in succesfully implementing it the human factor should be considered as well. This is one of the topics UiPath Immersion Labs is focussed on. At TOGETHER Amsterdam the Rocking Robots team disucussed the involvement of people and the opportunities digital upskilling provides them with Claudia Pedersen, Immersion Labs Operations Director at UiPath.

This week Amsterdam hosted the largest automation event in Europe: UiPath Together 2022. A broad range of topics related to automation was presented to the people attending, showing automation at this stage is far more then just RPA. A growing number of organizations is not just scaling their software robots, but actually innovating with technologies like AI, machine learning, document understanding and process mining.

After several year of research and development Delft start-up IMSystems is ready to present its patented speed reducer to the market. This high precision gearbox uses rollers instead of gear teeth. At Automatica in Munich it will demonstrate its first product, a development kit for robot companies to test the system.