industry

Velodyne Lidar and MOV.AI  are collaborating to provide robot manufacturers with enterprise-grade automation solutions, including mapping, navigation, obstacle avoidance and risk avoidance. The MOV.AI Robotics Engine Platform, combined with Velodyne’s lidar sensors, addresses the growing demand for automation in dynamic collaborative environments such as e-commerce, logistics, manufacturing and hospitals.

Robot mobility is booming worldwide: Unit sales of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in the logistics sector e.g. will increase by 31% between 2020 and 2023 annually. At the same time, the use of AMRs in public environments will also go up rapidly – IFR predicts unit sales will grow by 40% per year worldwide.

Industrial robot manufacturer FANUC has received a major order in the field of e-mobility. Scheduled for delivery in 2022, the company will supply the Cologne plant of Ford with around 500 robots to assist in the construction of electric car bodies.

ABB expands its YuMi collaborative robot portfolio with the GoFa and SWIFTI cobot families. Eight out of ten workplaces say they will increase use of robots in the next decade, pandemic cited as catalyst for accelerating investment in automation.

Without a doubt, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) was already on the radar of many UK businesses at the start of last year. Simon Perks, Head of Robotics and AI at a UK digital transformation consultancy called Agilisys, for example, claims to have been working pre-pandemic with a client that’s used the approach to cut the time needed to assess a claim from 15 days to just 24 hours–which means that whereas a person would previously need 12 minutes to process a form, their new virtual worker assistant is able to do it in three.

Percepto, provider of autonomous inspection by industrial robotics, announced a strategic investment of $45 million led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) to launch a solution for remote, fully autonomous, asset monitoring, inspection and compliance of industrial sites. This includes the partnering of autonomous robots with drones.

Cognite, vendor of  Global industrial AI software-as-a-service (SaaS), has partnered with exploration and production company Aker BP to deploy Spot, the quadruped robotic dog, to pioneer the remote controlled offshore mission on the Skarv installation, 210 kilometers offshore in the North Sea.