Schunk Expert Days on Service Robotics
Service robotics conquers factories and living rooms
At the tenth Schunk Expert Days on Service Robotics, it became clear that there are more and more intersections between industrial robots, transport systems and smart assistants for commercial and private use. On the other hand, success in service robotics is increasingly determined by the willingness to form networks and cooperate.
The top speaker that Managing Partner/CEO Henrik A. Schunk welcomed to the stage at the start of the Schunk Expert Days was just under 60 centimeters tall: Nao is the name of the humanoid robot, which has more than 25 degrees of freedom and can move its hands, arms, legs, head and torso almost like a human. Connected to IBM Watson, Nao, a demonstrator of artificial intelligence, is able to analyze natural language and give answers independently. Visual recognition tools can also be used to recognize faces and objects and analyse them for specific characteristics.
Success through cooperation
In his keynote speech, Prof. Dr. Thomas Bauernhansl from Fraunhofer IPA used the example of Arena 2036 to illustrate how important cooperation between different disciplines will be in the future in order to solve the complex tasks of tomorrow's production. As the leading research platform for mobility in Germany, Arena 2036 has set itself the goal of rethinking and implementing the entire value chain of the fully digitalized vehicles of the future.
More than 30 partners, from suppliers and IT service providers to car manufacturers and various research institutions, are working together on the areas of mobility, production, work and digitalization. Topics include the use of swarm intelligence in intralogistics, the use of mobile platforms to load machines, as well as the substitution of material flow with information flow. This also includes shifting process complexity to where it can be handled most efficiently, says Bauernhansl. Open source communities in particular, such as the ROS software framework, digital twins or their preliminary stage, digital shadows, as well as the use of systems for data analytics, are important enablers of new types of production scenarios.
Trend towards autonomous systems
Prof. Dr. Sami Haddadin, winner of the Deutscher Zukunftspreis 2017, Prof. Jiping He from the Beijing Institute of Technology (China), Dr. Minas Liarokapis from New Dexterity, a research institute for robotics and bionics at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and Prof. Dr. Torsten Kröger from KIT, among others, described the path to autonomously operating grippers and handling systems.
The intralogistics sector in particular is currently experiencing a boom in service robotics and is working intensively on intelligent solutions. The presentations by Magazino, DHL, Robert Bosch Startup and Fetch Robotics illustrated how efficiency in large warehouses can be increased with the help of autonomous transport platforms and cloud systems and how the development process from the idea to the market-ready collaborative system can be achieved.
Yvonne Straube from BMW gave an insight into the car manufacturer's research activities, which range from the use of virtual assistants and exoskeletons to the use of robots as hand-guided tools. Similar to the presentation by Søren Peter Johansen from the Danish Technological Institute, BMW also made it clear that service robotics will be an effective way to support and relieve humans in production, for example in parts handling or assembly tasks, without replacing them. On the contrary: robots secure and create jobs, as processes can be designed much more efficiently. Søren Peter Johansen reported that there is now a real bottom-up movement in Denmark: Workers who have recognized the advantages of collaborative systems are calling for their introduction instead of rejecting them out of unfounded fears.
Next year, the Expert Days in Service Robotics will take place outside of Germany for the first time, namely in Denmark: on February 27 and 28, 2019 in Odense. as
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