With the arrival of 2022, China AGV (www.chinaagv. Com) compiles and reprints the leading figures in the US media robot industry and looks forward to the future. The following is what they will focus on in 2022.
Juan Aparicio, vice president of products, ready robotics, USA
More robots will continue to be deployed, and the number of robots in internal logistics and services will continue to increase. Asia will continue to be a leader in installation. Bin picking will become the mainstream, and successful deployment will continue to enable extreme cases to be handled manually. The main bottlenecks will remain labor shortages and fragile supply chains. Manufacturers will need to use ingenuity in their deployment, use less hardware and / or enter a reusable market.
Industry consolidation will continue
The price of sensors and other robot hardware will continue to decline, enabling start-ups to provide robot solutions in non-traditional industries such as construction and catering. As more robots are installed and more people interact with them, the demand for ease of use and interoperability will increase. In addition, more companies will realize that robotics is not a one-time tool, but a core part of their digital journey. For companies, it will be more important than ever to invest in cultivating internal sensitivity around automation, avoid the temptation of excessive automation, and start with low-risk solutions that have no black box for engineers and technicians. The retraining and upgrading of personnel skills, as well as the conscious selection of automation hardware and software that any worker can master quickly and skillfully, will still be the key to success.
Sadly, companies entering this field will continue to carry out a large number of repeated inventions and tests. The demand for universal robot platforms will continue to increase.
Adam rodnitzky, chief operating officer and co-founder of Tangram vision
I expect that with the active M & A activities, we will see more venture capital pouring into robotics, autonomy and related fields. I think this has little to do with the saying of labor shortage, but more to do with a better understanding of the areas where robotics can have a positive impact. Just as factory automation has replaced semi skilled labor in a multi billion dollar industry, so has fruit harvesting and truck driving. On the contrary, some models that replace unskilled labor in speculative markets (such as sidewalk delivery robots) will begin to face the headwind of financing.
I also predict that we will see the emergence of robot start-ups. No one on the team is a robot expert in the classic sense. This will be attributed to the maturity and integrity of the tools that can be used to create a robotics company from scratch. You can now combine the off the shelf operating system (ros2), add it to the off the shelf chassis (Clearpath), add the necessary sensors (realsense, velodyne, etc.) and developer libraries (moveit, Tangram vision, roboflow), and you will participate in the competition months to years earlier than a few years ago.
Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of embedded and edge computing of NVIDIA
Compared with the physical world, a million times more robots will be built in the virtual world, because it is expensive, slow and unsafe to develop and test physical robots before fully adapting to real-world operations.
2022 will be a key year for the full use of simulation. Combining the latest artificial intelligence technology with RTX ray tracing graphics and accurate high-performance physical modeling, the development of robot technology will be accelerated.
Ken Goldberg, Professor of industrial engineering and operations research; University of California, Berkeley; William S. Floyd Jr. Dean, Department of distinguished engineering, University of California, Berkeley; Co founder and chief scientist of ambi Robotics
My hunch is that 2022 will exacerbate the roar of robots in the 2020's. Here are three trends that are expected to grow rapidly:
(1) Tactile sensing: Although digital cameras have made significant progress in the past decade, there has been very little progress in tactile sensing since the 1980s. However, meta (Facebook) has just launched a major initiative to develop tactile sensors using accurate, reliable, fast and cheap internal optics. The research community is pleased to explore how these sensors can enhance robot operation.
(2) Sim2real learning: if the simulator can accurately simulate complex factors such as contact, impact and friction, the simulation can greatly accelerate the reliable learning of the robot. This has been elusive, but deepminds acquired the mujoco simulator in November and is now expanding it to solve problems in robot operation. A similar work by NVIDIA suggests that efficient and reliable handling simulators may be imminent.
(3) Division of labor between robots and people: the automation of driving and package processing depends on the division of labor between robots and people. Practitioners realize that boundary conditions must be carefully defined to distinguish when robots work reliably and when they are unreliable. And switch the control accordingly. For example, ambi robotics is working with our automated parcel handling customers to identify the types of parcels that are difficult for robots to handle so that they can be processed upstream manually. I believe this trend will become more complex as robots are adopted to meet the growing needs of e-commerce.
Timothy Chung, program manager, tactical technology office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
I expect a significant increase in the shared and widely available digital infrastructure of robotics - including on-site robot data sets, on-site testing and operation expertise and tools, and a powerful virtual environment - to narrow the gap between (mostly) simulation and reality and continue to accelerate the global deployment of real robots in complex environments, similar to and beyond the environment faced by DARPA subt challenges.
Kristian hulgard, general manager, Americas Division, onrobot, USA
We see that "package deal" applications tend to be first-time users or small users of robot automation. Instead of piecing together robotic applications from many different sources and wondering about compatibility, reliable tracking and total cost of ownership, users are increasingly looking for application suites to provide plug and play settings in which all components are verified to work together, starting from day 1.
As we begin to focus more on reducing application deployment time, this trend will only intensify in 2022. The demand for automation has not declined, so how can we deploy applications faster to meet this demand and help manufacturers solve the problems of labor shortage and supply chain interruption, while many small and medium-sized enterprises are facing the problem of "I need robots now"? We must provide less customized automation and consider developing ready-made standardized solutions to a higher extent.
We also need to study how to help manufacturers adjust and optimize existing applications. Lean manufacturing and industry 4.0 are not just buzzwords. Our customers want operational insight into the execution of robotic applications. They need real-time equipment diagnosis, alarm and preventive maintenance measures to minimize costly robot unit downtime.
Shermine gotfredsen, global sales director, roeq robotics, Denmark
We expect more autonomous mobile robot (AMR) participants to expand their capabilities beyond manufacturing and further penetrate into other industries such as hospitals, services and e-commerce. We also predict that more AMRS are not limited to indoor sports, but have stronger outdoor mobility.
In 2022, more attention will be paid to developing a third-party ecosystem for AMR, so that end users can choose mobile robot devices that have been tested and reviewed to cooperate well with AMR, so as to make deployment simple, fast, safe, reliable and cost-effective.
Brian gerkey, co-founder and CEO of open Robotics
As the world of collaborative robots matures, I begin to see the logical inflection points of end users more frequently. Medical care, e-commerce, logistics, manufacturing and other industries are using the second or third wave of robots. In most cases, the procurement of these robots is different from the existing procurement. Interoperability is the next major challenge for robotics. If the robot of supplier a does not communicate with the robot of supplier B, the end user will encounter problems.
This is a challenge that we have been addressing in a medical institution in Singapore since 2018, and we will continue to address this challenge through our open-rmf program. Not only is it important that robots from different companies can communicate with each other, but this robot language also needs to be extended to other devices, such as smoke alarms, elevators and so on.
Joe Campbell, senior manager, strategic marketing and application development, universal robots
I foresee that the easy-to-use collaborative robot paradigm will be extended beyond machine management and to complex process applications, such as welding, cutting and distribution. Examples are OEMs, such as vectis automation, which build products based on cooperative robots, and welders can set and program for plasma cutting and MIG welding; Robot27 has launched a popular dispensing kit. In 2022, we will continue to see the emergence of new user-friendly application solutions for more advanced and heavy collaborative robot tasks.
I also predict the expansion of cloud based tools to further simplify collaborative robot programming. The pandemic makes it very clear that our users need to access their collaborative robots, whether they can come to the scene or not. They need robotic toolsets to help them understand how their applications work, gain visibility into problems, and enable them to proactively support production and machine uptime.
Sami atiya, President, robotics and discrete automation, ABB
We are at the beginning of a decade of change. Companies from all walks of life need to respond flexibly to global trends, from labor shortages and supply chain uncertainty to rapidly changing consumer behavior with the explosive growth of online personalized orders, as well as increasing pressure on sustainable operations.
In 2022, we will see more demand for flexibility and more enterprises adopting robotics. As AI improves the adaptability of robots and completes more complex tasks, they will continue to surpass traditional manufacturing and enter logistics and warehouses, laboratories and even retail stores. Think of self-taught cooperative robots working with people and autonomous mobile robots running in a dynamic environment. This decade will lead to robots as familiar as smartphones or laptops in your workplace - I think 2022 will bring us closer to this reality.
Jason Bergstrom, head of Deloitte and head of smart factory
I predict that in the next two years, the demand of AMR will shift from material transportation to other uses, such as flexible working platform, data collection equipment and edge computing equipment. We have seen the trend of manufacturers using AMR to expand functions, such as selecting and even assembling items by using mechanical arms. These expanded uses of AMR are changing the way manufacturers think about materials and work functions in factories to optimize agility in the manufacturing process.
In addition, AMR can act as an "agent" to provide real-time data related to plant materials, environment and processes. Since AMRS are supported by on-board computers, they can also be used to perform calculations on these data and provide and adjust real-time decisions.
Finally, the increased use of AMR will also promote the demand for battery technology progress, such as long-life batteries and even automatic replacement systems to quickly replace batteries rather than charging.
Markus Schmidt, President of ristag Americas
Flexible and scalable robot automation technology has first gained a firm foothold in the implementation of e-commerce, because these systems enable e-retailers to adapt to fluctuating demand and rapid growth in a way that traditional automation cannot do. Now we see these systems expanding to new applications.
In applications ranging from pallet handling to item picking, these solutions enable warehouse operators to independently expand throughput and inventory. They are fundamentally able to drive higher performance without the need for higher performance at the same or expanded inventory. This ability, combined with unprecedented redundancy, makes them a simple automation option even for hesitant people.
They can also adapt to the shape of the buildings where they are deployed and support the trend to increase distribution capacity by upgrading old warehouses or reusing unnecessary or underutilized facilities, such as closed retail stores. Although it is not new to the market, flexible robot automation technology has changed from replacing fixed and inflexible technology to the first choice of operators in almost every industry.
