BULK HANDLING, STORAGE & LOGISTICS
Five automation predictions for 2023
T
he past few years have seen many organisations implement tech-driven changes at a rapid pace. As society embraces and adopts digital technology, the effective management of new processes becomes key to the success of almost every business. The rapid workplace transformation evident across industries, whether that’s moving to hybrid working or adopting new technologies, prompts us to ask: what can we expect from 2023? Anders Beck, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Universal Robots, discusses five predictions for the coming year.
1. Turnkey solutions In recent years, we have witnessed the development of many different types of sophisticated technologies. Advances in robotics, machine learning and other technologies have increased the pace of this change tenfold. While these promise to revolutionise the business world, all technology companies face the same challenge — they can’t be good at everything. In the world of robotics, this is no different. Creating a robotic system requires hardware development, software development, application development, sensors and interfaces — to name a few. That’s why 2023 will be the year of turnkey solutions. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) — companies creating new applications and products around existing technologies — will lie at the heart of this. They 38
March/April 2023
can drive innovation by combining technologies to deliver complete solutions for the most common applications, such as welding and palletising. The result? Automation will become more sophisticated yet easier to use than ever before. Enabled Robotics, an OEM based in Denmark, is a great example of how this works. Since 2016 the company has been working to combine two types of cutting-edge technology by mounting cobots onto autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). This hybrid technology is now operating in industry, warehouse management and production and bringing robotics to service applications and hospital intralogistics. Ultimately, these out-of-the-box solutions make it easier for companies to integrate crucial technologies and there is no limit to the imaginative ways companies will bring robots alongside humans in the world of work.
2. Modular production Traditional industrial robots remain important in some parts of manufacturing, but we are seeing a trend towards the deployment of more flexible models of production. This is largely due to the fact that traditional industrial robots are typically large and fixed and entail complex deployment. In contrast, cobots can perform a similar range of activities to traditional industrial robots but are smaller, lighter and much
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