Identifying Opportunities Track

Socially and emotionally intelligent robots pose an incredible opportunity not only for the market, but for our loved ones young and old. Embodied has built an advanced social interface that enables human-like interaction: changes in the intonation of voice, smiling, reading body language and eye contact, and more without long, awkward pauses or the need for the use of constant wake words.

Moxie the robot has helped neurodivergent and neurotypical children with social, emotional and cognitive development. This includes specific content modules and conversations around making mistakes, reading, emotional regulation and recognition, making friends, and more. It has the ability to recognize progress and understanding of topics, and can prompt children when it detects the child could benefit from further development in an area. Moxie is also able to respond with eye contact and gesticulate with its arms, making for a more believable, personal experience.

This framework is being applied to service additional populations, including senior citizens, adults with mental illnesses, neurodivergent adults, people experiencing loneliness, and more. Dr. Pirjanian will explain the considerations and developments going into this new iteration and offer an onstage demonstration.

Warehouse automation is a growing trend, and it involves the complexity of combining materials handling equipment, sensors, conveyance, and software to solve these challenges at very high speeds. Labor challenges continue to impact the growing warehousing and e-commerce markets so we must look to identify best-in-class technologies that can solve the complexity in the warehouse. The warehouse of the future includes more efficient picking and sorting technology, with fewer errors and increased reliability regardless of the packaging.

In this session, Salvalaggio will break down the different descriptions of mixed product palletizing and depalletizing and describe how vision technology and software create new applications within the warehouse. He will break down case studies of robotically inducting cases into an automated storage-based system.

Attendees will learn about:
• Challenges associated with mixed load palletizing and depalletizing
• Real-world examples for pallet to storage case handling solutions
• Vision enabling technology for de-palletizing and case-handling solutions

Mobile manipulation faces the challenge of market readiness and costly in-house production of AMRs, robot arms and software for end users. Startups like IAM Robotics and other major companies have shifted their focus towards readily available, market-ready robotics use cases that offer the quickest returns on investment.

This talk will assess the current state of Autonomous Mobile Manipulation (AMM), emphasizing the identification of effective strategies for enabling fully autonomous navigation, missions, and arm manipulation. Combining AMRs and perception-driven autonomous manipulation is the Holy Grail, creating a versatile robotics platform for countless applications.

The Chinese robotics industry has never been so exciting. Last year, every second industrial robot in the world was sold in China. The market is now setting major trends in industrial automation: first in the manufacture of electronics and now in electric cars, batteries and photovoltaics. Because the country is a leader in these areas, companies there are benefiting from corresponding economies of scale and learning effects.

In recent years, domestic manufacturers have increasingly moved into areas previously reserved for foreign robot manufacturers. One reason for this has been supply chain problems at the international top 4, but also technical advances at some domestic manufacturers.

Compared to Europe and the U.S., there are more engineers available, both on the developer and system integrator side. Together with the local supply chain that has developed in recent years, this enables shorter product cycles and drastically lower costs for machine vision, robots and peripheral products. Due to fierce price competition in their home market, Chinese manufacturers are also increasingly looking abroad. At the same time, the political environment is making the market less and less transparent for foreigners.

This talk will provide insights into the latest developments in robotics in China and what can be expected from there.

Adopting robotic automation is traditionally an expensive, highly complex, and time-consuming process that must be approached as a significant capital project. Even with the current 800,000 open positions in manufacturing, the US is deploying robots 12 times slower than China, with only around 40,000 robots deployed every year. Less than 10% of factories in the US have robots in production tasks. Why aren’t robots more widespread? Could AI be the solution? Can the latest wave of generative AI make an impact in the adoption of robotics and automation?

Juan Aparicio has spent his career discovering new applications for AI in automation. Join this session, where Juan will share the recent innovations in AI that are reducing the cost of deployments and accelerating timelines. Most importantly, Juan will separate the hype from the real world applications, and provide actual examples on how these technologies are changing robotic automation at factories all over the US.

The global market for warehousing is estimated to total over $400 billion, but less than 5% of that market is automated. However, the increasing complexity of supply chains, along with increasing pressure on profitability from rising costs and competition for customers and labor, has created demand for warehouses with tech ecosystems — networks of robotics and software designed to optimize safety, efficiency and profitability.

In 2023, an example of such a tech ecosystem was launched in the U.S. The site includes one of the largest deployments of robotics in logistics and an industry-first combination of state-of-the-art automation. The technology solutions were selected to optimize returns operations, also known as reverse logistics, for a consumer electronics company, and custom-designed to handle a high rate of throughput at minimal cost, while increasing accuracy and productivity, lowering costs, and raising profitability for the customer. The warehouse is capable of processing 50,000 electronic devices per day with technology that can pick a specific item from over 2 million pieces of inventory in seconds.

This session will highlight the different types of technology — including automated storage and retrieval robots, robotic arms, GTP robots, as well as data analytics, many of them industry-first implementations — and how they were strategically integrated to create a state-of-the-art tech-ecosystem at this warehouse of the future.