Industrial robots will become more integrated, easy to use, and widely deployed, especially in China, which is becoming a hub for robotics, and the bulk order fulfillment business of companies such as Alibaba and Amazon will be its next stage The driving force for growth.
These are the pioneers in robotics, Rodney Brooks, current chairman and chief technology officer at Rethink Robotics, who gave a keynote speech at a recent event.
Today, more than half of factory robots fall into the hands of system integrators. They deploy robots with a variety of sensors and then train them. This usually entails writing custom programs and generating proprietary information that remains in the plant.
In the meantime, future industrial robots will integrate sensors and computer vision, robots that integrate these systems can be trained directly without having to encode them on an open platform that sends data to cloud services. "Brooks predicts that widely used The future of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) is 'art.'
Rodney Brooks said: 'The business model is disappearing now ... The industries we are in are slow to deploy, but not so often.'
Brooks imagines a future in which an unbridled robot responds to voice commands, freeing its 'supervisor' from the current interaction in scripting languages.'In the past five years, we've seen a tremendous amount of voice system functionality Boost ... Voice technology will play a bigger role in the factory. '
He told hundreds of industrial robot operators: 'The robotics industry is not going to make a dent in the 20th century ... but with the hard work of so many small start-ups, things are changing; tens of thousands of entrepreneurs are flocking And it's a bit of a worry to me.
Hundreds of robotics start-ups in China at the moment, encouraged by government industrial policies and the Chinese government wants to maintain its position as a global manufacturing hub, Brooks said factory staff turnover is now 16% 30%, while robots are considered the key to solving the factory labor shortage.
'Many of these Chinese start-up companies are manufacturers of low-end, low-cost, lightweight industrial robots that support six degrees of freedom and are inexpensive, so it's hard for U.S. and European companies to compete there ... we can Ridicule their level of innovation, but its ability to innovate is only a matter of time. "
To date, Brooks said Foxconn's commitment to claim millions of robots in China's production line has not yet materialized, due in part to the challenges of today's robot programming Brooks original Roomba robot vacuum cleaner was manufactured in Shenzhen , Barba sold 20 million units today, making it the largest-selling robot to date.
Bulk order fulfillment operations from companies such as Alibaba and Amazon will also be huge catalysts for the next generation of robots and may also use machine learning.
Brooks said: 'Amazon Robotics, a warehousing and logistics robot company in Amazon, has 700 employees in Boston alone, but these robots are unable to pick and place and have to hire people every year at Christmas Assisted. "He also pointed out that Amazon funded a college challenge packed robot.
'The unbelievable demand for sorting and packaging operations at these order fulfillment centers and each one's unique packaging will propel the robot arm in ways never before seen and will also affect the plant in unpredictable ways Automation. "He said it is a 'huge' demand that will allow many to join the robot industry '
Security is another major challenge, and to this end several working groups have been set up by the Robotics Industry Association.
Rethink's own robots currently set the payload and speed limits as a first step toward security, but this is not feasible for factories that need to handle heavy loads quickly. "Some companies are starting to use external cameras and controls Surveillance and management of robots, but more solutions are needed.
In the longer term, he believes the trend toward an aging population may require "a voice-activated robot to help you get in and out of bed - an important bet on safety."
Rethink's current robotic arm, which embeds the power of cameras, force sensors and learning and memory, says: 'We were not able to do everything high-level PLC did, but we were still able to do a lot of things.'
He predicts that another major change will be the shift in the plant toward wireless networks.
He said: 'Many of our customers do not have any internet presence in the factory and many of our customer information is blocked ... wireless is changing all of that quickly; there's going to be an entirely different set of infrastructure And policy. '
In contrast to Embodied Intelligence, recently founded by robotics researchers at Berkeley University in the United States, Brooks does not consider VR headsets to be widely used in robotic interfaces. Instead, he Think that regulators will use the tablet to monitor and manage the automation plant.