Spotlight

John Deere has been honored in the Robotics category of the 2021 CES Innovation Awards, which recognize outstanding product design and engineering in consumer technology products. This is the second straight year John Deere has received a CES Innovation Award.

Energy Systems Network (ESN) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), organizers of the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), unveiled at CES 2021 the official racecar that will be autonomously driven by scores of university teams in the world’s first high-speed, head-to-head autonomous race at the Racing Capital of the World on Oct. 23, 2021.

Ultimately, it’s about people, not technology. It has become clear again in 2020 that technology and innovation are not an end goal, but tools that are used to achieve a business or social goal. That is one of the recurring themes in the conversations we have had for Rocking Robots this year.

Although this international edition of Rocking Robots only started in the second half of this year, we covered quite a few trends and developments in AI, robotics and RPA in a short time. Video’s are a popular content-item on this platform, so in this post we share a few video’s that symbolize the current trends.

Enterprise software industry veteran Gavin Mee–who’s held leadership roles at Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle–became Managing Director of UK & Ireland at RPA leader UiPath in December. We were lucky enough to be the first press to speak to him about his new role.

At the Global IBM Watson Center Munich cloud AI solutions are demonstrated on real use cases. Until March 2020, visitors from all over the world came for hands-on experience with the AI-controlled robots in person: customers, partners, the press. But then came Corona. How do you manage such a global know-how center in these social distancing times?

Pascal Bornet is a recognized expert and pioneer in the field of intelligent automation (IA). He founded and led the IA practices for Mckinsey & Company and Ernst & Young (EY), where he drove hundreds of IA transformations across industries. He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and he was awarded Global Top Voice in Technology 2019.

New research has shown robots can encourage people to take greater risks in a simulated gambling scenario than they would if there was nothing to influence their behaviours. Increasing our understanding of whether robots can affect risk-taking could have clear ethical, practiCal and policy implications, which this study set out to explore.

In October, Renzo Taal joined UiPath as Senior Vice President and Managing Director of EMEA. Prior to that he held several international roles at Salesforce, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Asia. Rocking Robots talked to him about his new role, his vision and the upcoming Reboot Work Festival.

Later this month (December 15 to 17 inclusive), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market leader UiPath is hosting a special ‘Reboot Work Festival’. The virtual event’s aim: highlight the ways companies are using automation to reinvent the way they work and free their employees to realise their potential, and on Day 2 there’s a special ‘Meet The Analysts’ event, with a topic of “Where are we and where are we going?”