Heineken says its autonomous robot can hold up to 12 cans of beer, will follow you down the sidewalk and has a friendly AI personality.

Heineken says its autonomous robot can hold up to 12 cans of beer, will follow you down the sidewalk and has a friendly AI personality.

The vision of Robots and Humans working together has been popularized by numerous Hollywood movies, comic books and the media for many decades now. Success stories about the application of automation in the manufacturing industry date back to the early 1980’s, when welding robots demonstrated efficiency and resilience to deliver on time and increased the overall supply. And ever since, robots have been used for a variety of applications such as painting, assembly, disassembly, pick and place for printed circuit boards, material handling, product inspection, and testing, all accomplished with high speed and precision. In the past few years, however, the world is seeing a significant shift towards AI-enabled robots that are changing the game by bringing various levels of autonomy into the picture. If we consider the example of the labor-intensive task of warehouse piece picking,  AI-enabled robots are learning to handle millions of objects with minimum help from humans. What once required individual item registration and programming of robots, can now be accomplished with self-directing or autonomous robots using deep learning algorithms. This in turn, is helping industries cut costs and improve profits in the long run. Further, with the dawn of COVID-19, the way we patronize restaurants and shops and see our doctors has changed drastically. From collaborative robots (co-robots) to robots with high levels of autonomy, the trend continues towards the application of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) in every industry and retail setting; more so as societies are restructuring places of work and pleasure to minimize human contact. The accelerated adoption of AMRs is being seen in many frontline roles from spraying disinfectants to delivering & serving food to customers, in outdoor and indoor urban hotspots. A key advantage of using AMRs is that they are able to reliably do these repetitive physical tasks when many workers aren’t safely able to or willing to set foot in these areas. As AMRs are becoming more and more competent, a few popular ones that are gaining traction during this pandemic are discussed below.   TELEPRESENCE ROBOT Telepresence Robots or Virtual Assistance Robots, now more than ever, are revolutionizing the way we work or learn remotely. They enable telecommuters, doctors, remote workers, and students to feel more connected to their colleagues by giving them a physical presence where they can’t be in person.   Image Credit: Using robots to enable patients to be inspected remotely In recent times, Telepresence robots are being put to use to enable interactions with COVID-19 patients in isolation wards. These semi-autonomous robots could be teleoperated over the Wi-Fi, to visit the patients and provide a live video link to their loved ones or to deliver their food and medication.   DISINFECTANT ROBOT  In the post pandemic world, disinfecting shared public places has been a tricky problem to solve. A non-intrusive solution widely adopted in recent times is UV-C light, but due to its adverse effects on human skin, trolleying it would look somewhat like the image below.   Image credit: UV-C based disinfection trolley by rapid cleaning of hospital environment, helping in the fight against COVID-19 Enter AMR, mounted with a UV-C lamp as a payload, which would traverse autonomously in a designated area.                                                                                     Image Credit: Weston Robot   This is accomplished by using the mobile app where the user creates a map of the area and chooses the waypoints for the robot to traverse. The robot then follows the waypoints and stops at each waypoint, till the disinfection job is done. Also, it returns to the charging station once the battery is below a threshold eliminating the need for human intervention. A swarm of these robots could be used in and around the areas where the most interactions occur such as hospitals, railway stations, airports, etc. An intrusive solution would be to air-blast disinfectant liquids similar to the ones used in agricultural spraying, to increase the chlorine content in the air and reduce the possibility of aerosol transmission.   Image Credit: Robots deployed to disinfect open spaces This fully autonomous solution is basically an AMR, mounted with a sprayer mechanism, which can navigate to the decontamination area using pre-built maps giving  the technical staff less exposure to these highly concentrated chemicals while working in an entirely safe and risk-free environment. The range of its spray devices can reach up-to 30 feet.   LAST-MILE DELIVERY ROBOTS As door delivery businesses saw a huge increase in demand during the pandemic, Last-Mile delivery robots found application as a reliable and safe contactless delivery system. These robots are an alternative to human food delivery drivers from companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash, which perform tasks that a person cannot do safely. These companies have created and deployed cool new robots with the intelligence to navigate city streets to deliver orders from selected restaurants to the customer location using a mobile app, while avoiding dynamic obstacles like pedestrians.   Image Credit: Autonomous delivery robot   The robot’s body is equipped with a storage bin with a locking compartment where the restaurant stores the delivery package and the bin only unlocks upon authentication by the customer at her location during delivery. Typically, these robots are equipped with cameras and computer vision driven by machine learning. They can detect and classify what they see, and tell the difference between a car, a person, or a wall. While these robots are definitely cool tech; procuring, running and maintaining fleets of robots can be prohibitively expensive. To circumvent this, the solution that small restaurant owners are turning to is the clever ‘Robot-as-a-Service’(RaaS) business model for food delivery, which is becoming more crucial as Covid-19 reshapes the gig economy.   ROBOT AS A SERVICE Many are now familiar with the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) or Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) where the intent is to democratize technology while lowering the barrier to entry for businesses, large and small alike. One of the new areas, this philosophy is becoming more prevalent, is “Robot as a Service” (RaaS), a cloud-based “robotic rental” solution used for both B2B or B2C businesses. RaaS takes the capabilities of robotics and removes the upfront cost of robot installation with large amounts of computing power, utilities, and knowledge.  And so, small- and medium-sized businesses are increasingly experimenting with RaaS because of its flexibility, scalability, and lower cost of entry compared to traditional robotics programs. For example, finding sufficient  numbers of workers in a warehouse, for online retailers during seasonal surges is quite the challenge. With the RaaS model, these seasonal labor shortcomings can be mitigated without investing in equipment that won’t be used in slower periods while still being able to quickly scale up to meet the high demand. RaaS might be the answer for businesses, trying to figure out how to improve productivity or reduce risk, but always thought, robots were out of their price range.   ROBOTICS AT IGNITARIUM Robotics and in particular Autonomous Mobile Robots is an area where Ignitarium has been developing technology solutions for the warehouse use cases. Robotics as a theme started as a R&D thread to leverage the existing skills in computer vision and AI/ML. In the past year, we have demonstrated various use cases on sensor fusion, integration of Lidars & Radars, visual odometry using RGB-D Cameras, path planning, obstacle avoidance, integrating with deep learning modules for object Classification / Detection / Tracking. Our vision is to create a software package which is hardware agnostic, for use  across hardware platforms with minimal customization.     CONCLUSION The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) such as Telepresence, Disinfectant, Last-mile delivery robots. Roboticists are also seeing adaptation of AMRs to new niches and are exploring new avenues. Although the robotics wave is changing the way services and products are sold, there are still challenges to overcome like the amount of customization required, both in hardware and software for the robots to adapt to customer specific needs. Regardless of the hurdles, RaaS will be the inevitable solution many organizations seek either with hardware & software or software-only flavors.

Whether you turn to news outlets, tech magazines, or academic sources for insight, you're likely to hear that the COVID-19 pandemic is going to drive massive growth in automation, especially via robots.1 The arguments in favor of this view seem reasonable: Main Street might look dead, but companies that provide shippable goods have been facing double, triple, or even 10 times their previous demand. Robots, the thinking goes, should be able to reliably do that repetitive physical work when many workers aren't safely able or willing to set foot in the building. What's more, access to the technology is getting less expensive, with "robots as a service" models allowing companies to pay per touch rather than dipping into precious capital reserves. And robots are becoming more capable. In just the past few years, for example, we've seen a small number of companies building and selling AI-enabled robots to pick things out of bins, handle parts, tend machines, and test the latest electronics.

Plug-and-play automation systems can be rapidly set up to meet sudden surges in demand -- and quickly reconfigured when needs change. Whether you turn to news outlets, tech magazines, or academic sources for insight, you're likely to hear that the COVID-19 pandemic is going to drive massive growth in automation, especially via robots.1 The arguments in favor of this view seem reasonable: Main Street might look dead, but companies that provide shippable goods have been facing double, triple, or even 10 times their previous demand. Robots, the thinking goes, should be able to reliably do that repetitive physical work when many workers aren't safely able or willing to set foot in the building. What's more, access to the technology is getting less expensive, with "robots as a service" models allowing companies to pay per touch rather than dipping into precious capital reserves.

Governments are leveraging the benefits of AI and robotics in many fields like healthcare services, transportation, defense, and national security. Governments are rapidly accepting the use of AI, which is opening up new opportunities for innovation in government services, like taxation. Tax is the primary source of money for the government which is necessary to support all the public sector functions. Collecting taxes from citizens in a shorter time and reducing the number of tax defaulters increases the effectiveness and efficiency of tax collection. Effective and efficient collection of tax enables the government to make adequate investments in public sector functions.

Since the microchip, machine learning and Artificial Learning (AI) is the next biggest innovation. Those who kept asking what is machine learning have now realized it isn't a fiction, but a reality instead. Technologies such as neural networks are paving the way towards artificial intelligence breakthroughs. People are now more productive, healthier and happier than before with machine learning technology tools. Industry leaders claim that machine learning is ushering in another phase of the industrial revolution.

While robotic surgery already exists, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence advancing the medical industry means we're only going to see more of it. And leading experts say it's not as far off as we might think. Professor Dian Tjondronegoro, of Southern Cross University, has listed the top five ways we will see robots in medicine in the next decade. Virtual doctors could help us through our smartwatches, with their advice verified by a human doctor, alerting us to potential emergencies before they happen, saving the health system millions. And Prof Tjondronegoro said because the doctor-to-patient ratio was continually decreasing globally, AI was going to transform the future of healthcare.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is expected to be the next big thing in technology, and many tech companies are investing heavily to make sure they don't lose out on opportunities as and when the technology becomes more mainstream in the coming years. While AI has already started intriguing and exciting industry insiders and tech enthusiasts alike, the increasing chatter surrounding the new technology has given rise to multiple concerns regarding job losses and science fiction-like scenarios of AI-enabled robots starting to exert control over humans, eventually taking over the planet, not unlike the dystopian sci-fi movie'I, Robot'. While Alphabet Chairman, Mr. Eric Schmidt, has already admitted that jobs may be at stake because of artificial intelligence, the founder and CEO of Facebook, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, recently categorically denied that AI-enabled robots are about to take over the planet any time soon. Whatever be the case, most established technology companies are diving into AI-related research headlong, and while American tech giants like Google and Facebook are already burning the midnight oil on research related to artificial intelligence, South Korean conglomerate, Samsung, is also spending the big bucks by investing in a number of tech startups worldwide, in an effort to increase its presence in the sector. According to reports in the South Korean media, Samsung Venture Investment, which happens to be a subsidiary of the Samsung Group and hence, a sister concern for Samsung Electronics, has already invested a truckload of money in more than ten global tech companies, all of which are deeply involved in AI-related research.