A perfect pair

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise in many areas of society and the economy. The technology is also increasingly being used in industrial production, where it offers a wide range of benefits. For example, robots with integrated AI can act much more precisely and flexibly. They are also easier to adapt to new requirements. This applies equally to industrial robots, autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and collaborative robots (cobots).

Both analytical and generative AI is used in modern industrial robots to raise productivity to a new level. Thanks to the transformation of large amounts of data into usable information, robots can use AI to act completely autonomously even in unstructured, dynamic environments. An example from the automotive industry: thousands of spot welds on the body of a vehicle must be reliably inspected in order to meet the required quality standards.

achieve. Manually, an inspector could check around 85,000 spot welds per year. A robot with integrated AI, on the other hand, can handle more than 1.8 million inspection processes, which increases productivity by a factor of 20.

1,400 articles per hour automatically grabbed

The combination of robotics and AI can also clearly demonstrate its advantages in item picking applications: ABB's robotic item picker is able to precisely identify a wide variety of items in unstructured warehouse environments and pick them up safely using a vacuum gripper. The system reliably recognizes whether the respective object corresponds to the specified shape and size.

This makes it possible to reliably pick or separate a wide variety of items and deformed packages in warehouses. The robot achieves a pick rate of up to 1,400 items per hour and is therefore significantly faster than any human.

Mobile robotics in factories also benefit from AI technologies. If these are combined with 3D image processing, this paves the way for Visual SLAM (Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping): AMR can use this to distinguish between fixed and moving objects, map their surroundings independently and make intelligent decisions on this basis. In addition, ABB's AMR-Studio software ensures intuitive programming and control processes, reducing the time required to commission the AMR by up to 20 %. This lowers the hurdles and simplifies implementation. Companies with a low level of automation or a lack of internal robotics expertise benefit from this in particular.

Efficiency gains along the entire value chain

These use cases clearly show how the intelligent synthesis of AI and robotics is paving the way for new application scenarios along the entire industrial value chain. Central workflows in both manufacturing and logistics can be made more efficient, productive, reliable, safe and flexible. Another advantage is that people are relieved of tedious, dangerous or repetitive tasks and can devote themselves to more demanding tasks.

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