sustainability

Hai Robotics, provider of autonomous case-handling robots (ACR) systems, has announced that it has joined the United Nations Global Compact initiative—a voluntary corporate sustainability initiative.

The future of work, AI and sustainability were the main trends at automatica 2023. Rocking Robots is official mediapartner of this event, the largest robotics-fair in Europe. In this videoreport our team speaks about these trends with Filip Tuypens, FANUC; Christopher Schneider, Yaskawa; Thibaud Verschoor, IMSystems.

The Digital, Autonomous and Robotics Engineering (DARE) Centre at the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult’s testing facility in Blyth has been opened by Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, Graham Stuart MP.

Environmental Sustainability has become a top business priority for CEOs, demanding aligned performance from sourcing. Therefore, by 2026, 70% of technology sourcing, procurement and vendor management (SPVM) leaders will have environmental-sustainability-aligned performance objectives for their functions, according to research by Gartner.

At least 70 cities in Europe can now prevent huge amounts of waste from ending up in the sea. This has been demonstrated in the city of Aarhus in Denmark, where the robot SeaProtectorOne, made by All In On Green, collected over 100,000 pieces of waste from the city’s river in just 20 months. The technology thus shows how much pollution the city is otherwise sending into the marine environment.

In Las Vegas Gartner highlighted the six trends that will have significant impact on infrastructure and operations (I&O) over the next 12 to 18 months. Automation and sustainability are set to play an important part in this timeframe.

A new Gartner survey revealed that 87% of business leaders expect to increase their organisation’s investment in sustainability over the next two years. Customers are the primary stakeholder group creating pressure for organisations to invest or act on sustainability issues, selected by 80% of executives, followed by investors (60%) and regulators (55%).

The new global economic reality, combined with an unprecedented labour shortage, is encouraging companies to reconsider sustainability strategies. Until recently, sustainability has been synonymous with environmental goals for many businesses and, as a result, treated as an add on to corporate strategy. Sustainability can no longer be considered in isolation. 

Robots can be a very powerful tool in the energy transition, says Elinor Doubell, VP Digital Science at bp, in this report from the European Robotics Fair. Earlier this week she was one of the keynote speakers on robotics and sustainability. In this video she talks to Rocking Robots about the way robots change the way of working at bp.

A quarter of the worlds energy is lost due to friction, corrosion and wear. Robots are machines with movable parts, and the machines that are used to make them obviously have moving parts too. This makes lubrication an interesting but largely ignored part of sustainability in robotics. That is why Castrol Industrial presented at the opening keynote at the European Robotics Forum in Rotterdam. Rocking Robots discussed the importance of reducing friction in robotics with Susan Frame of Castrol Industrial.