CLOUD ROBOTICS H Pei-Breivold, K Sandström, L Rizvanovic, M Lehtola, S Azhar, R Kulläng, M Larsson, ABB
Few doubt that in the near future, robotics will fundamentally change production systems and dramatically increase their level of automation. To do so, robots will have to figure out for themselves how to solve problems and adapt to dynamic environments. This can be achieved by exploiting the IoT to facilitate the creation of new technology involving large-scale data propagation, stream analytics and machine learning.
38 WHAT'S NEW IN PROCESS TECHNOLOGY - JULY 2017
I
t is predicted that the use of robotics in manufacturing and automation will increase significantly in the near future and that this growth will drive a major expansion of the industrial robot market1. These expectations are predicated on industrial robots finding their way into many more automation scenarios than is currently the case. Today, industrial robots can tirelessly repeat complex tasks with high precision — for example, welding, painting, automobile production and certain types of assembly. However, there are many other manufacturing or assembly scenarios that would benefit from robotic automation but that are challenging to automate. This can be due to, for example, short production runs or environments that are not well enough controlled. In many of these cases, humans currently play an important role. If the use of robots is to be extended to these challenging scenarios, robots have to become more flexible, easier to program and more autonomous. Further, at
www.ProcessOnline.com.au