Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
November 11, 2021
…automotive, as well as labor shortages exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, reported the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) today. Third-quarter 2021 sales brought the total number of orders so far this year to nearly 29,000 units valued at $1.48 billion, the best numbers ever recorded for the North American robotics market, said Ann Arbor, Mich.-based A3. The number of units sold increased by 37%, up from 21,072, and 35% in value, up from $1.09 billion, over the same period in 2020. It surpassed the previous highest records from 2017 by 5.8% and 0.5%, respectively. In Q3 alone, North American companies…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
October 04, 2021
…next day.” After the acceleration of e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic, how does the approaching holiday shopping season look? “Santa's turning from reindeers to robots this year.” — Rick Faulk, CEO, Locus Robotics “Santa's turning from reindeers to robots this year,” said Faulk. “We're seeing a couple of dynamics. The peak is happening earlier this year, as companies offer sales before Black Friday to flatten out the peak. It's hard for operations to run during sharp peaks, and nobody can get enough labor. We're also hearing from customers that the online population is aging in a good way, as people…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
July 16, 2022
…to achieve production targets. Post-pandemic supply chain stabilization The COVID-19 pandemic challenged supply chain regimes across the world. The temporary closure of ports of entry deprived manufacturers of critical supplies, which in turn caused a slowdown in manufacturing activities. In 2022, most sectors of the economy are rebounding. Governments are slowly easing pandemic control measures, and international borders are opening up. Manufacturers learned several lessons from the pandemic period. The financial losses, which ran to billions of dollars, were a wake-up call for manufacturers to explore innovative methods to increase supply chain resilience. Manufacturers are struggling to replace all jobs…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
June 15, 2023
While the COVID-19 pandemic increased interest in robots for disinfection and social distancing, robots also promise to help shorthanded hospital staffs diagnose patients while reducing the spread of pathogens. Touchlab yesterday said that a hospital in Finland is using its Välkky system, which is designed to give remote clinicians a sense of touch. “In the past, telerobots have been limited to being able to see, hear, and speak on behalf of the people using them,” stated Dr. Zaki Hussein, CEO of Touchlab. “Now, thanks to our innovative e-skin technology, robots like Välkky can ‘feel’ too—and not only on their fingertips.”…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
August 19, 2023
…billion in fiscal year 2022, began to answer before COVID-19. That’s when it launched the reinvention of the supply chain that largely supports the Macy’s brands. One metric for the company is the “inventory productivity,” according to Dennis Mullahy, chief supply officer at Macy's. “If I can generate the same amount of sales with the least number of inventory receipts and fewer moves, I can maximize inventory productivity,” he said. Macy's strategy demonstrates that supply chain innovation can have a positive impact on an organization’s bottom line. In its financial report for the fourth quarter of 2022, Adrian Mitchell, Macy’s…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
September 27, 2021
…face in developing the Mark 3 release during the COVID-19 pandemic? Theobald: The pandemic has focused us as a species on challenges. It was hard for customers to deploy new technologies when people couldn't get on site to map a space. But at the executive level, they understood for the first time how important flexibility is in the automation they adopt. Prior to the pandemic, labor shortages were already a problem. Now, with stuff changing so fast, fixed-infrastructure automation is not as attractive as it used to be. It has a place to be sure, but we recently talked with…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
January 04, 2022
…up with accelerated e-commerce demand amid worker shortages and COVID-19 restrictions, said NVIDIA. The AI and computing challenges of AMRs are similar to those of autonomous vehicles, according to the company. In industrial facilities, robots “travel miles of aisles to roll up millions of products to assist teams of moving people,” it said. “Obstacles are ever-present.” As manufacturing centers and warehouses are reconfigured or scaled up to meet changing demand, the path planning and re-routing of AMRs must be tightly coordinated, said NVIDIA. “At industrial scale, even small routing optimizations can save billions of dollars in the $10 trillion logistics…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.32
August 27, 2024
…processes. But by 2023, and largely spearheaded by the COVID-19 pandemic, the company shifted its focus from hardware to software. “The pandemic gave us the ability to deploy all these robots because everybody needed them,” said Kim Losey, CEO of Rapid Robotics. “We figured out how to use primarily cobots at that time to do all kinds of machine tending tasks, from pad printing PCR chips for covid tests, to packing pharmaceuticals into boxes, dispensing pills into jars and putting embalming fluid in boxes.” Losey noted that the market and demand for automation helped drive revenue for Rapid, but created…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.31
January 17, 2023
…have supply chain problems from geopolitical conflicts and the COVID-19 pandemic affected robotics developers? “It was a massive disruption,” replied Lau. “Being unable to get parts limited our ability to build robots for two years. Fortunately, we had a good team that could employ creative solutions to get parts we need. We're stockpiling certain serial numbers of parts.” While the robotics industry tends to start small, producing 60 robots rather than 1 million, vendors do need 100% of parts to proceed, she noted. Some companies have had to redesign their systems or have multiple configurations, trading off labor for parts,…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.31
September 10, 2021
…need to be able to adapt and scale seamlessly. COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of our labor-driven supply chain infrastructure — it showed us that our offshore networks can easily be disrupted. The pandemic also indirectly exacerbated the labor shortage problem two-fold: factories have been forced to operate at reduced capacity to respect the new social distancing directives, and in many cases, unemployment benefits (along with a reluctance to be in close proximity to co-workers) de-incentivized human operators from going back to work. These shortcomings are not going away anytime soon until we find a vaccine or reach herd immunity.…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.31
August 12, 2021
…goods, which are growing exponentially this past year, with COVID-19 and everyone shipping products. Everyone is trying to optimize internal logistics, from candy to pharmaceuticals. They're also trying to limit fork truck traffic.” “Logistics and e-commerce is the third space we're seeing demand higher-payload robots,” he added. “There is demand for AMRs in grocery, but those are mainly smaller loads that are prepicked, sorted, and taken to areas to transfer to customers. Cold storage has come up quite a bit.” Although there is some interest in mobile manipulation, it has been more for UR cobot arms on the MiR250, and…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 0.31
March 24, 2022
…year of home-office and remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic did not slow down innovation, said igus. The company cited 168 product developments, such as motion-plastics gears manufactured via injection molding, with 740 different items available in its online shop. igus' 4-year-old smart plastics business unit launched 12 new products for condition monitoring, preventive maintenance, and the Internet of Things (IoT) in 2021 alone. In combination with real-time cable monitoring for Ethernet cables and the integrated, solar-powered “EC.I” condition sensor, customers can now avoid unexpected machine shutdowns, igus said. RBTXpert enables robot integration As part of digitization support, igus…
