Spotlight

The World Economic Forum, in partnership with Accenture and Microsoft, unveiled at its Annual Meeting 2023 a working prototype of its Global Collaboration Village, a purpose-driven metaverse where organizations can convene to learn about, create solutions for, and take action on the world’s most pressing challenges.

The Indy Autonomous Challenge team PoliMOVE from Politecnico di Milano (Italy), and the University of Alabama (Alabama) won the second annual Autonomous Challenge at  CES reaching max speeds of 180 mph, a new autonomous speed world record for a racetrack.

Early-stage robotics startups looking for help can now apply now to the Odense Robotics StartUp Fund, offering funding, mentoring and incubation to ambitious robotics and drone startups from Denmark and abroad.

This year Rocking Robots again reported on trends and developments in AI, robotics and RPA. Especially the eventreports attracted a lot of viewers. In this overview we recap the videos that typify the year 2022:

The vision of Rocking Robots is to report on the interaction between humans and robots. The interviews we published this year show that we as humans are increasingly successful in making robots work for us. However, it remains important to pay attention to pre-eminently human issues such as ethics, acceptance and safety. Where that happens, applications of technology arise that actually help us as humans.

Dutch startup Fectar has developed an app that teaches Ukrainian children to recognize mines. This first-ever interactive augmented reality (AR) hologram lesson was created for explosives education. The lesson stems from the question soldier Charles Valentine asked himself: “How can we help the Ukrainian people to demine their country if 30% of the ammunition fired has not exploded but is still there?”

Hyundai Motor Group has started two pilot delivery service programs using autonomous robots based on its Plug & Drive (PnD) modular platform at a hotel and a residential-commercial complex located in the outskirts of Seoul.

ABB has opened its state-of-the-art, fully automated and flexible robotics factory in Kangqiao, Shanghai, China. The 67,000m2 production and research facility represents a $150 million (1.1 billion RMB) investment by ABB and will deploy the company’s digital and automation technologies to manufacture next generation robots – enhancing ABB’s robotics and automation leadership in China.

This week the future of robotics will be on show in Spain. At IFEMA Madrid a broad spectrum of technologies related to robotics will take center stage. Approximately 10.000 visitors will be informed about a trends in robotics. Compared to several years ago the main trend is the intelligent connection of these technologies. As CEO Enric Forner says: “The future of robotics is intelligent robotics.”

Banks and other financial institutions typically have hundreds or thousands of their headcount involved in manual IT application testing. This means testing is a big burden on their resources, especially since this industry is highly regulated. Therefore, effectively automating application testing presents a huge opportunity.