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Top 5 Robots of 2022: Watch Them Change the World
Robots have rolled into action for sustainability in farms, lower energy in food delivery, efficiency in retail inventory, improved throughput in warehouses and just about everything in between — what’s not to love?To get more news about GRS, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
In addition to reshaping industries and helping people, robots play a role in the transition away from fossil fuels. The first commercially available electric tractors with autonomy also launched this year, packing AI to support more sustainable farming practices.
Monarch Tractor Plows New Path
Developers have been digging into agriculture technologies for the past several years, but Monarch Tractor in December released a revolutionary new electric tractor that checks a lot of boxes.
Monarch, based in Livermore, Calif., unveiled the first commercially available tractor with autonomy, which is compatible with computer vision-guided smart implements like precision sprayers for herbicides.Using six NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX system-on-modules, Monarch’s Founder Series MK-V tractors are essentially roving robots.
Farmers won’t get range anxiety with these either. The highly capable sustainable farming tractor can run all day on a charge. The NVIDIA Jetson platform provides energy-efficient computing to the MK-V, which offers advances in battery performance.
Cartken Puts Delivery Bots in Reach
Food delivery has been a hot ticket with consumers, driving mobile apps that deliver from restaurants. An offshoot of this, robot food delivery startups are assisting some of these companies.
Cartken, based in Oakland, Calif., is serving Grubhub and Starbucks deliveries with its robot. It’s among a growing pack of robots-as-a-service companies that harness NVIDIA Jetson for edge AI.
The startup relies on the Jetson AGX Orin module to run six cameras to support mapping and navigation as well as the complete sense, perceive and control stack.
Cartken joins the food party as startup Kiwibot is making a splash here, too. And Cartken has thousands of reservations for its on-demand robot service, according to the company.
Robot deliveries are poised to boom. Robotic last-mile delivery is expected to grow more than 9x to $670 million in revenue in 2030, up from $70 million in 2022, according to ABI Research.
Service robots provide a glimpse into the future
Robots are serving as samplers for nucleic acid testing (PCR), Peking Opera actors, coffee and ice cream makers, chess masters, and elderly care workers at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.To get more news about GRS, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
WAIC has evolved into a stage for demonstrating the capabilities of service robots and artificial intelligence, giving visitors a glimpse of what life will be like in the future.
Flexiv demonstrated its PCR robot, which features industrial-grade force control, computer vision, and other AI technologies, at its WAIC booth. It completes the sample-taking cycle within 28 seconds. In the future, it will be a new touch-less, safe, and efficient sampling method, but it still requires medical certification before being put on the market officially.
Flexiv's massage and therapy robot is also on display. It can do massaging tasks such as "pressing, pushing, and kneading muscles near the spine and waist."
ABB and Jaka showcased robots that could churn out ice creams and carry out other industrial tasks. HK-listed SenseTime's Xiangqi, or Chinese chess, master robot is a candy box-sized robot with 26 chess levels to match players of various skill levels. It is intended for children to learn tactics and to give company to the elders.
UBTech has introduced five service robots for elderly care, including intelligent mobility, box delivery, supported walking, and companionship. The company's smart old care services for the elderly community are currently available in Shanghai's Songjiang, Shenzhen, and cities in Shandong Province.
According to Tan Huan, co-chief technology officer at UBTech, the robots can serve as life care, security, memory care, and for spiritual requirements and medical rehabilitation. It is expected to play an important role in elderly care in the future.
It has huge market potential in China with its elderly care industry today accounting for 7 percent of national GDP.
According to the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the size of China's robot sector is forecast to reach US$17.4 billion by the end of 2022, with an annual average growth rate of 22 percent over the previous five years.
Subscriptions for robotic help?
From a global energy crunch and sustainability concerns, to extended supply chain disruptions, recovery from a worldwide pandemic, and inflation and labor shortages – each is creating a new challenge for manufacturers and consumers alike.To get more news about Robot Subscription, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
At least when it comes to labor shortages, there seems be a solution within technology. Industry leaders have had to find new ways to do business. And autonomous robots have become an effective solution to the labor shortage problem.
Some of the biggest issues to previously using robotic solutions – high capital investments, speed of installation and programming, and productivity predictability – have seen considerable research and development in recent years.
What is Raas?
RaaS is a service-oriented business model, which has the potential to achieve the goal of democratizing robotics automation by reducing the cost of entry for users and enabling advanced robotics technologies to be used by enterprises of all sizes. However, some businesses are beginning to recognize a subscription-like opportunity for robotic equipment. Just like in other ‘as-a-service’ models, manufacturers rent the use of the robotics, although the robot itself is owned by the vendor and as such provides maintenance, updates and 24/7 remote monitoring, as well. The service cloud acts as a clearing house to monitor the overall availability of robotic resources, and to schedule, distribute and instruct robots by their tasks and location, and the service provider is responsible for maintaining and ensuring the operational availability and uptime of the robot fleet.
Advantages to RaaS
Issues of labor and cost management are universal. With RaaS, companies of all sizes can control costs, achieve fast ROI, respond to growing demand and optimize their workforce.
Manufacturers will not need to staff multiple factory engineers, maintenance technicians or programmers. Users are able to configure the robot's functions using a simple interface, train it and apply it to a specific case, which greatly simplifies robotics solutions, which likely are already equipped with APIs and SDKs for common functions.
In addition, finding temporary workers is not easy. Manufacturers can rent robots during times of high demand, without investing in hardware. RaaS provides high scalability.
Another significant advantage of the RaaS model is that service providers are constantly updating and improving technology, so customers do not have to worry about obsolescence. Customers can keep up with advances in technology and the benefits it brings.
There has long been apprehension about including robotics and automation in some enterprises. This is especially true when considering retrofitting facilities originally designed for human laborers. Robots would require dedicated, human-free work zones. There is likely a need to expand the facility’s electrical infrastructure, and possibly its HVAC as well. And this is before the presumably large capital expense on the robotics themselves, which likely disrupts productivity during installation and training.
This creates several benefits for the manufacturer. They do not own or need to set up the machines, which reduces capital expenses for new equipment. Maintenance and machine monitoring is handled by the vendor as well. If a machine breaks, the vendor is required to swap it out for an equivalent, which minimizes production delays. Manufacturers only pay for effective robot uptime, only when robots are busy. Because the RaaS provider takes care of all design and maintenance, companies can deploy automation even if they lack in-house expertise.
Top Logistics Robots That Can Take Your Business to a New Level
Managing warehouse operations can be challenging and exhaustive. So, companies gladly implement smart technologies, mainly robotics and artificial learning (AI), to optimize warehousing and logistics activities. Logistics robots are proving to be particularly beneficial for many logistics and e-commerce companies, which use warehousing services extensively.To get more news about Logistics Robotics, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
At present, the trend of equipping warehouses with autonomous solutions is increasing. It is boosting the significance of timely deliveries across logistical facilities. In addition, the escalating demand for complicated supply chain operations and e-commerce order fulfillment services is a significant factor responsible for the appearance of robotics for logistics solutions.
Labor-intensive operations across warehouses are pushing facility owners and retailers to integrate logistics robots, which is further propelling their market growth. In this guide, we look at the top logistics robots that can take your business to a new level and explore their various uses and applications and the numerous benefits they offer to the logistics industry.
The deadly coronavirus pandemic has had a significantly profound and permanent impact on retailers, manufacturers, and global supply chains.
According to a June 2021 Institute for Supply Management survey, even though manufacturing output is slowly returning to pre-pandemic levels, most companies and their respective suppliers are still struggling to meet increasing levels of demand.
The Institute for Supply Management found that wide-scale shortages of fundamental materials, record-long lead times, escalating commodities prices, and challenges in transporting products continue to have an impact on all manufacturing segments.
These factors pose many significant challenges for retailers who experienced increases in their e-commerce sales volumes in 2020 and anticipated that demand will rise in 2021 and beyond.
Taking care of the ever-increasing shipment volumes is just one of those challenges for retail logistics experts. E-commerce operations usually call for workers to carry out tasks such as individual picking, shipping, and packing per item more often than what bulk transportation of brick and mortar retail stores needs.Even when these companies continue hiring extra employees, they heavily invest in automation and robotics technologies. Robotics applies to a vast range of areas within a logistics operation.
These include robotic item picking, goods-to-robot picking, goods-to-operation picking, transportation of goods, non-conveyable transportation, robotic sorting, and robotic put walls.
For instance, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) leverage groundbreaking technologies such as machine learning (ML), artificial learning (AI), and computer vision for navigation without calling for additional human operators or infrastructure.
They gather and analyze thousands and millions of data points in real-time to comprehend how to carry out specific tasks more efficiently. Not only do these robots match the jobs human workers perform, but they also greatly minimize the risks of injury.
Many tasks in logistics applications are dirty, dull, and unsafe. They’re physically demanding jobs off of people that require continuous repetitive motion, along with potentially lifting heavy-weight machines.
Unlike humans, robots will not get hurt or tired while carrying out these tasks hour after hour, day after day. They free their human equivalents to focus on other tasks requiring more critical problem-solving and thinking skills.
Army of service robots rolling in to replace high-cost labour in Korea
Accelerated by soaring labor costs, the reduced number of workers willing to take labor-intensive jobs and pandemic-triggered noncontact services, South Korea has seen a growing number of businesses deploying front-line service robots that have begun replacing humans in performing mundane and routine tasks.To get more news about Robots on Demand, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
Korea’s service robot market will grow to an accumulative 230,000 robots by 2025, worth 2.8 trillion won ($2.25 billion) in value, according to market data compiled by the International Federation of Robotics. As of 2020, its size had grown 34.9 percent on-year to 857 billion won, surpassing that for industrial robots. The global market for service robots is expected to grow to $74 billion by 2026.
To meet growing demand for automated services, tech and manufacturing giants here are jumping into the sector of service robots, which is still at a nascent stage compared to the market for industrial robots.
A service robot contains an automated computer program built to perform customer-oriented tasks. Unlike industrial robots that are typically used at factories, service robots can be applied to such tasks as for restaurants, medical care and at homes.
Platform provider Naver opened its new headquarters last month with an aim of creating the world’s first robot-friendly building where robots roam the floors to serve coffee and deliver parcels. Artificially intelligent robots also automatically take notes during meetings.
Its latest focus has been expanding into the business-to-business market, completing a lineup of six kinds of its flagship CLOi robot with different purposes like delivery, docent and cleaning. The latest version can self-drive and sterilize surroundings with ultraviolet lamps.Samsung Electronics is set to launch its first robot product in August — a wearable medical robot called Gait Enhancing & Motivating System. Its name will be Fitsam, according to the patent that Samsung has registered with the Korean Intellectual Property Office. The Samsung wearable robot can be attached to the ankle, knee or hips to enhance the muscle strength of users with walking difficulties. Samsung completed FDA approval last month for its global launch. It has also patented a total of 25 robot products that assist humans in housekeeping, education and sports.
Not just targeting the local market, companies are seeking ways to take their robots abroad.
Hyundai Robotics, a Hyundai Motor subsidiary, signed an agreement with British telecom Vodafone to develop service robots targeting Europe. They will test-run quarantine robots at university hospitals in Germany before supplying 5G-based service robots to restaurants, hotels and nursing facilities.
But concerns remain over the leakage of data using robots, as the majority of them are assembled overseas, such as in China.
According to the industry, more than 70 percent of service robots here, such as those developed by Baedal Minjok and SK Shieldus, are from major Chinese robotics firm Voodoo Manufacturing and Keenon Robotics.Using cameras, lidar and radars attached to them, robots take photos or save related data to the manufacturer’s big data server — this means that local firms, who just attach logos on imported robots, are easily exposed to risks of data leakage,” said an industry insider.
There are also concerning voices that point to the need for the government to bolster related laws to actively protect and further nurture the local robotics industry. In case of the US, it applies a 25 percent tariff to service robots imported from China, whereas Korea has no special regulation regarding robot imports.
There is a mutual growth between the eCommerce businesses and logistic industries, and it is a common trait.To get more news about Logistics Robotics, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
Automation is nothing new for the logistic industry. Even the use of steam engines during the industrial revolution can be labelled as automation to a large extent.However, with the advancement in technology, a new form of automation has emerged in the form of robotic pickers and packers.
Also, automation is being employed in different areas of the logistic industry. One such automation is warehousing automation which has extremely high potential, especially for logistic companies like VRL and DTDC.Warehouse automation functions by employing both software and technology which include but is not limited to sensors and robotics which are used to automate tasks.Warehouse automation is possible by using software like inventory management software and warehouse management software.
The warehouse management system is particularly important because it is designed to automate the manual processes and data capture to control the inventory and support the different kinds of data analysis terms. Everything comes together, to improve the efficiency of the supply chain functions.
The different categories of warehouse automation are basic warehouse automation, warehouse system automation, mechanized warehouse automation and advanced warehouse automation. As the name itself suggested, each of these automation is an advanced version of the previous category, respectively.Warehousing automation has solved many problems and at the same time is creating opportunities for the logistic sector to improve its efficiency. Warehouse automation presents opportunities in the logistic sector in the following ways.
Firstly, the goods to personal fulfilment are one of the most popular applications of automation in which vertical lift systems and conveyors are used to increase the efficiency of warehouse picking. With the effective application of goods to personal fulfilment, any company can easily double the speed of warehouse picking.
The second most common application of warehouse automation includes automatic guided vehicles that run within the warehouse. These vehicles are designed to work within the warehouse with the help of sensors, strips or wires.
They have to navigate through a fixed path to move along the warehouse. These automatic guided vehicles are helpful in cutting down manual movement. However, the real benefit of automatic guided vehicles can only be utilized in large warehouses instead of the small ones.
Thirdly, robots can be a part of warehouse automation to ensure the safety of workers. Warehouse operations are many times involving risky activities. Such risky activities can include work like handling heavy items and operating with toxic products and high-traffic environments.Robots in warehouse automation can be employed to work with heavy products and a toxic environment. This reduces the risk to the employees.
Autonomous mobile robots also play an important role in warehouse automation. Most of the time, autonomous mobile robots are more flexible than automatic guided vehicles. These autonomous mobile robots are designed with an advanced laser guidance system.
Their primary job is to remove obstacles from the way in warehouses that have a busy working environment because of plenty of human traffic. They work to make a safer working environment in a dynamic ecosystem.Also, warehouse automation reduces the extent of the error. For instance, robots that are wired to function as barcode readers. The robotic barcode readers make fewer errors in comparison to manual barcode reading.
Most of the warehouse automation elements ensure lesser error. The less error creates an inventory that has lower loss and waste. Most of the inventory fulfilment issue arises due to human error as a result of manual process management. Warehouse automation highly eliminates the risk of such errors.
Even though warehouse automation solves quite a lot of problems and creates plenty of opportunities, automating a warehouse is not an easy job. Automating a warehouse requires proper planning.However, it is worth investing in warehouse automation because it creates better utilization of resources, reduces the operational and labor cost, optimizes the warehouse space, improves the warehouse environment and reduces inventory loss.
Top 7 Robotics Trends & Predictions for 2022
To kick off the new year, Meili Robots has compiled a list of the seven biggest trends and predictions for the robotics industry in 2022: To get more news about Robots on Demand, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA):
As the name suggests, RPA is a commonly used technology for businesses that deal with a large amount of repetitive tasks. A great example of such a business would be hospitals that deal with manual invoicing, appointment scheduling, and inventory management — all tasks that can easily be automated through RPA.
Robotics as a Service (RaaS)
Thanks to ever-growing trend of everything-as-a-service models, small firms are now being enabled and empowered to adopt robos and RPA in the form of subscription-based Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) as well as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models — such as Meili FMS.
Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) as data acquisition platforms
Driven by the e-commerce growth, labour shortages, increasing automation, and mass personnalisation of goods, the demand for AMRs has been growing at incredible rates — from €0.88B in 2017 to an estimated €6.17B in 2022. In fact, AMRs are now expected to start acting more like IoT hubs — where mobile robot software would add another €2.64B to the AMR market value.
Retail automation is seeing significant growth, too, with retailers being expected to add multi-purpose robots to work alongside their team — and thus referred to as cobots — in order to carry out multiple tasks at once and thereby making it easier for them to meet the ever-growing customer expectations and shopping demands. At the same time, cobots are permanently taking over certain jobs across different industries to improve workplace safety and efficiency.
Increased awareness of the lack of interoperability
With the increasing adoption of robots across the industries comes an increased need for a solution that addresses the lack of interoperability in the industry:
“Interoperability is a factor that could be easily overlooked by many robot operators. It allows robots to communicate with each other and other systems to enable an efficient and safe working environment. If not tackled, it can be a crippling pain point that halts the productivity of the facility — or even grinding it to a halt as some, if not all, robots start obstructing or interfering with each other.” - Aldus von der Burg, CEO, Meili Robots
Delivery robots on the rise
The market for delivery robots is expected to grow from a value of €188M in 2021 to nearly €850M by 2026 — following a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 35.1% during the forecast period. This market growth is mainly driven by the reduction of last-mile delivery costs, increased venture funding, and an increased demand for delivery robots in the retail and food and beverage industries.
Increased robotics demand & abilities
Last but not least, with robots becoming smarter every day thanks to the advances in technologies such as Machine Learning, AI, and the IoT, more and more industries that have been adopting robots are becoming smarter too — think of warehouses, distribution centres, and manufacturing facilities. With processes being increasingly automated, companies will see great advances in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and operational consistency.
Stretch thus far hasn’t been nearly as high-profile as Spot. Understandably so. For one thing, it wasn’t Boston Dynamics’ first commercial robot after decades of research and development. For another, it’s designed to mostly be behind the scenes, moving boxes around out of public view. As much as anything, Spot has been a kind of brand ambassador, courting publicity and a touch of controversy for the Hyundai-owned robot maker.To get more news about Logistics Robotics, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
Stretch, an offshoot of the company’s Handle project, has been piloted with a limited number of customers in recent months. Boston Dynamics also secured a massive deal with DHL back in January for the purchase of $15 million worth of the robots. Other early clients include clothing chains Gap and H&M.
Today, the system goes on sale for anyone who wants to purchase one. Well, goes on reservation is probably a more accurate way of putting it, as deliveries are not expected until 2023 and 2024. The company predictably cites ongoing labor issues as a key driver in interest around the new robot.
Labor shortages and supply chain snags continue to create challenges in keeping the flow of goods moving,” says CEO Robert Playter. “Stretch makes logistics operations more efficient and predictable, and it improves safety by taking on one of the most physically demanding jobs in the warehouse. Many of our early adopter customers have already committed to deploying the robot at scale, so we are excited Stretch will soon be put to work more broadly, helping retailers and logistics companies handle the continued surging demand for goods.”
It will be interesting to watch these systems perform in the world. Thus far we’ve mostly seen Boston Dynamics videos in controlled environments. Stretch faces some stiff competiton. Warehouse/logistics have been one of the top categories for robotics in recent years, as companies have looked for a leg up against Amazon’s large automation army. More recently, they’re searching for systems that can help fill employment gaps.
Robots are learning to think like humans
In a lab at the University of Washington, robots are playing air hockey.Or they’re solving Rubik’s Cubes, mastering chess or painting the next Mona Lisa with a single laser beam.To get more news about Robots on Demand, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
As the robots play, the researchers who built them are learning more about how they work, how they think and where they have room to grow, said Xu Chen, one of those researchers and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at UW.
“From a robot’s viewpoint, artificial intelligence is getting more and more mature,” Chen said, referring to the software and algorithms that help a robot take in its surroundings and make decisions. “But if we want a full-scale robot to be able to think very quickly and cleverly, and then be able to do things in the physical space, I don’t think we’re there yet.”The games are a way to get one step closer to taking the robots out of the air hockey arena and into the workforce, asking machines to shoulder tasks like lifting and moving heavy boxes for hours at a time. Robots are already working in warehouses, helping Amazon and Walmart customers get their orders faster, but e-commerce and retail leaders want them to do more. The jobs have already been assigned but some of the technology still needs to catch up.
In Chen’s lab, the games can fill in some of those gaps, mirroring how a robot might operate in an ever-changing workplace. The laser painting is a scaled-down version of a 3D printer, which can be used to test and manufacture parts for the aerospace industry. Watching an air hockey puck fly down the table helps researchers understand how to “clean” the data the machine is processing from the environment around it.
Already, there’s growing demand for that type of technology. The market for automated solutions for warehouses — solutions that range from conveyor belts to robotic arms to autonomous carts that ferry packages around a facility without direction from a human — could reach $51 billion by 2030, based on an estimate from ABI Research, a New York-based firm that studies technology.
In a warehouse, automation and robotics can help businesses speed up operations. That can be good for a company’s bottom line but hard for workers, who push to keep pace with the machines. Concerns about that desire for speed are, in part, driving a growing union swell, particularly at Amazon warehouses, seen as one of the fastest e-commerce leaders.
“The acceleration of technology in all kinds of workplaces in new ways is actually a whole new set of reasons for people to get together and form a union,” said Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, a progressive economic research firm.
“I’m not surprised that technology is a factor in what would motivate workers to want a union,” added Lisa Kresge, who studies the intersection of tech and work at the University of California, Berkeley. “Because it’s increasingly a factor that’s affecting their lives.”Venture capital interest in automation saw a spike starting in 2016, when investors handed off more than $2 billion to companies working on automated solutions. In the first half of last year, investors had pledged $1.4 billion to the industry, according to data from research firm Crunchbase.
“There’s a lot of tasks that need to be solved,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation. “One of the exciting things now is companies are popping up who are only focusing on specific areas.”Autonomous robots at Amazon sites covered more than 1 billion miles last year, moving packages alongside human co-workers. When a bin arrives at a worker’s stowing station, a software system will shine a light on spots to avoid, helping to calculate the most efficient way to fit items in and around one another. An algorithm later determines — and delivers — the right amount of tape needed to seal up each order.
Amazon says its robots allowed the company to store 40% more inventory in its fulfillment centers. With the product easily on hand, it can shorten the time between when a customer orders, and when the package arrives at their doorstep.