Deutschland

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.

In dangerous situations a robot can keep human personnel safe. At ERF the Deutsches Rettungsrobotik-Zentrum (DRZ) showed their rescue robot, which has already seen service in real life emergencies. A special feature is awareness of its surroundings. iFor this report Marco van der Hoeven spoke to DRZ-researcher Nicola Rupp about emergency personnel learning to work with their new robotcolleagues.

NEURA Robotics has presented a range commercial cognitive robots family that can be used both in industry and as an intelligent Personal Assistant. Unlike conventional cobots, cognitive robots are meant to perceive their environment with all their senses, act autonomously based on AI, learn from experience, and can safely distinguish humans from other objects.

In Munich Automatica 2022 has begun. Rocking Robots will be present as mediapartner of the Holland Pavillion, to report on this robotics event. A broad range of robotics related themes will be covered this week.

Teledyne FLIR Defense will be delivering 127 PackBot 525 unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to the German Army (Deutsches Heer). The PackBot 525 is the most advanced model of Teledyne FLIR’s ground robot, used by U.S. and international defense forces since 2001. Is has seen action in combat zones like Afghanistan and Iraq. The 27 kg PackBot can do a wide range of tasks, such as bomb disposal, close-in surveillance, and situations involving hostages or hazardous materials.

Drastically reducing administrative tasks is only the first step on the automation journey for the finance division of Scania. RPA is helping it improve processes and the way it operates.

Cyngn, developer of autonomous driving software solutions for industrial and commercial applications, announced its collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies to demonstrate autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) powered by the Qualcomm Robotics RB5 Platform at the Hannover Messe Expo.

For a good 80 percent of industrial decision-makers in Germany, robots play an important role in saving resources and operating sustainably in production: robotics improves material and energy efficiency in manufacturing. In addition, green tech products can be manufactured competitively.

The United Robotics Group (URG), a subsidiary of the RAG-Stiftung in Essen, has reached an agreement with SoftBank Robotics Group Corp. (SBRG) to acquire their French subsidiary SoftBank Robotics Europe SAS (SBRE). SBRG will acquire a minority stake in URG and the two companies will continue to cooperate in the global marketing of various robots. By acquiring SBRE, URG will become one of the biggest service robotics companies in Europe.

Bosch has acquired Five, a European startup in the field of automated driving. At six locations in the United Kingdom, its roughly 140 associates are working on self-driving vehicles. Five gave preference to Bosch over other takeover bidders. The agreements with Five were signed at the beginning of April. It has been agreed that the financial details will not be disclosed. The acquisition is still subject to approval by the antitrust authorities.