IFR (International Federation of Robotics) pointed out that industrial robot is now facing mass requirements of enterprise transformation and digitalization, and that it becomes more and more acceptable for consumers to have service robot in their lives, giving the whole robot industry a positive outlook. Meanwhile, the situation of a single country as the only role of world’s factory will be replaced by a decentralized supply and production system composed of multiple countries. Therefore, the micro-trend of robot industry appears.
Top 5 robot trends in 2022 IFR announced:
1 - Robots adopted by new industries
2 - Robots easier to use
3 - Robots and humans up-skilling
4 - Robots secure production
5 - Robots support digital automation
Robotics transferred manufacturing process from traditional human labor to” smart” robots, carrying Industry 4.0 Automation. Over the years, robots have been created to take on dangerous or repetitive tasks that exceed human capabilities. Automatic spot welding, heavy material handling, toxic painting operations are also used robots for a long time. These devices require detailed programming and are limited to very specific tasks.
Robots nowadays include programmable design machine, enabling them to perform a range of actions semi-autonomously or fully autonomously. With full flexibility, they can quickly adapt to new tasks such as moving car engine, as well as simple assembling or operations. Robotics application is still expanding, to fields such as searching and rescuing, inventory checking, meal sending in hospitals, or towel serving in hotels. They are also applied at home environment, performing tasks such as taking pictures, play music, identify different person, through voice command. They can also patrol the risk factors at home while residents are away.
Robots have gone out of factory manufacturing and are used in the service industry. Besides solving ongoing shortage of workers, they also reduce human contacts. Since robots can take over more routine tasks, they can serve as important human labor with cost effectiveness. As for less automatic factories, they can apply human-robot collaboration as well.
The merging of robotics and AI has given rise to the current fleet of AI robots. With artificial intelligence, robots can “learn” to do new tasks. In some situation, we can input some database into AI robots to enable them learn faster, and repeat the operations to become smarter.
