Robotics

This article will highlight some of the key advancements surrounding automation for the composite industry.

IDTechEx recently visited Automatica 2018 in Munich. This is the largest biannual automation event in Europe. At this show IDTechEx focused on three trends: collaborative robotic arms, mobile robots, and various associated sensors. In this article, we provide a review of various company highlights.

Traditional robotic arms are caged, operating in robot-only zones. This is changing with the emergence of collaborative robotic arms.

In the past five years or so several major research groups have demonstrated that robots can learn to grasp novel varied objects with accuracy levels around 80-85%. Still performance levels, even in the labs, are sub-human but this is changing fast.

Last mile delivery remains an expensive affair in the parcel delivery business, often representing more than half of the total cost. Its importance is also growing thanks to a change in the composition of total deliveries with B2C deliveries rapidly taking on a bigger share. E-commerce companies are also pushing next-day and now same-day services, often at a major growing loss, hoping to take away that last stronghold of bricks-and-mortar shops: instant customer fulfilment. It is within this context that autonomising the movement in the last mile delivery step finds its imperative.

Trucking is a big business. In this article we will demonstrate how and why trucking driving is going autonomous.

This article covers a number of topics to highlight how robotic technology within agriculture is altering the landscape.

This premium articles consider mobile robotics on material handling industrial vehicles. It show how the rise of navigational autonomy will render, in time, the incumbent infrastructure-dependant automated vehicle technology obsolete, and how it will have a transformative impact on the fortunes of the greater material handling vehicle industry. Indeed, it will show how navigational autonomy will induce a colossal transfer of value from wage bills paid for human-provided driving services towards spent on autonomous industrial vehicles. This, in turn, will fuel the growth in this material handling vehicle industry (e.g., forklift), creating significant revenues over a business-as-usual scenario. This takes place despite our technology roadmap showing that hardware commoditisation will slowly devalue such driving services particularly in high-wage regions.

Trucking is a big business. In the US, trucking industry revenues are in excess of $726bn. No wonder then that autonomous trucking is a hot topic.