People in Robotics

Last week the City of Amsterdam received the 2022 Softbot Award for their innovative use of RPA. This award celebrates innovation in automation, with a broad spectrum of use cases from both public and private sector.  “A few years ago, RPA was mainly seen as a technology with which organizations started experimenting on a small scale. Now we see that we are in discussion at board level about organizing organizations differently with intelligent process automation.”

Robotics startups can struggle to get the help needed to turn great ideas into successful businesses. That’s why leading investors and companies from Denmark’s robotics industry and prominent commercial foundations have joined forces to establish a fund that will provide robotics and drone startups with the support they need – for generations to come.  

UK RPA provider The Robot Exchange will enter the automation market in the Netherlands soon. It is a market that is rapidly growing, with already a broad range of providers. But CIO Phil Johnston sees room for Robot Exchange because of some features in the offering, like the Robot-as-a-Service concept and The DeVol Recorder, which substantially speeds up deployment.

As they traverse the air, land, or sea, encountering one another or other obstacles, autonomous vehicles will need to talk to each other. Even cars with actual drivers could benefit from the ability to work together to avoid calamity and assure efficiency. Temporary, ad hoc networks will form around sets of vehicles and the onboard sensors and communications technology that allow them to navigate; they will interact, enabling them all to “see” one another and react accordingly.

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).