Advances in human-robot interaction, enabled by graphics displays, artificial intelligence and sensors, are ushering in a new generation of service robots that are easy to programme and intuitive to use. Today in industry throughout the world and increasingly in Asia, state-of-the-art products and systems – from flexible, collaborative robot tools to smart warehouses and humanoids – place people at the heart of their design, enabling not only better assistance and collaboration but also reduced costs.
“We don’t have a magic solution, but we’ve improved a lot,” says Francesco Ferro, CEO of PAL Robotics, the Barcelona-based pioneer of humanoid robots. “When we made our first biped robot in 2004, we needed at least five engineers to use it. Now, a client can turn it on and control it themselves. In the future, we will only have to speak with the robot and it will complete a task.”
Their robots are already used for entertainment and in healthcare. The company is 18 months into a retail pilot with a robot that autonomously navigates aisles full of shoppers to provide an exhaustive, daily, 3D inventory. It’s something few retailers can currently achieve, but this kind of data is invaluable for optimized decision making, explains Ferro.
Retailers are also taking advantage of highly adaptable mobile robots to provide in-store guidance and information for customers. Equipped with a dazzling array of features, including multi-modal controls with reassuring feedback in the form of expressions, lights and sounds, the Care-o-Bot 4, is now marketed by Unity Robotics, a Fraunhofer IPA spin-off. The robot’s award-winning design can already be seen hard at work at the German electronics store, Saturn Ingolstadt, helping customers find products and summoning staff when human assistance is needed.
Improving capabilities for robots, empowering businesses
The drivers behind safe, dependable human-robot interaction are artificial intelligence, machine learning models and sensors, such as the illuminating artificial skin, developed by TUM’s Institute for Cognitive Systems to react to proximity. Europe leads innovation to embody intelligence into mechanical robots. The objective is to make machines that are sensitive enough to not only avoid potentially harmful contact, but so they can even be guided with a feather.
“An area that I find really exciting is how to simplify teaching tasks to robots,” says Samuel Bouchard, CEO of Robotiq, Canadian manufacturers of collaborative robot tools. “Right now, we’re still using very low-level instructions. It requires a lot of expertise. If robots can have a higher level of abstraction, it’s going to be much easier to collaborate. The challenge is to put more intelligence into the different components.” The company’s goal is to empower businesses by showing them how to install robots by themselves, thus helping them to overcome workforce challenges, including a shrinking labour pool. “Obviously, the real goal is that we need to collaborate seamlessly,” says Bouchard.