Development

Join us as we map out routes to successful robotics manufacturing and commercialization! Our seasoned panelists will explore the critical importance of understanding both the problem a robotics product is intended to solve and the technologies that can be harnessed to solve it. Our experts – with diverse backgrounds in agriculture, construction and entrepreneurship – will share the roadmap of their proven routes to success. Discover firsthand how these industry leaders have conquered obstacles, scaled operations, and transformed ideas into successful products. Gain valuable insights to pave the way for your commercialization journey.

Join us to learn:
· Essential elements of successful commercialization
· How to simultaneously assess problems and technology awareness
· How to determine the best time to outsource manufacturing

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The need for increased productivity and lower cost are driving the growth of
robotics in various industries. In the past the push for robotic automation was
mostly constrained to industries with well-defined challenges in controlled
environments such as manufacturing industry and automated logistics. The nature
of the applications allows for straightforward, top-down optimization of the
robotic application and its subsystems. Although being complex in nature, the
resulting requirements for drive systems are often defined as part of a portfolio.
The customer selects the appropriate drive solution in terms of cost, efficiency,
power, precision, etc.
Today, robotics is entering new markets with weakly defined problem sets and a
broad spectrum of possible environment conditions. Examples of this trend are
mobile robots in inspection and agriculture, collaborative robots and medical
robots for assisted living and rehabilitation. Developing solutions for these
applications leads to multi-objective optimization problems with higher complexity
compared to classical applications. Top-down optimization approaches are
rendered obsolete because of increasingly important two-way interactions across
system layers. Robotic system developers and drive system suppliers benefit from
close cooperation to achieve the holistic optimization of the application including
its drive system.
This contribution outlines the challenges of novel robotic applications and shows
how drive systems as a sub-system are impacted. Our approach of integrating
component and robotic application models into a single, holistic drive system
optimization methodology is shown in detail. A focus is put on how the
cooperation of system integrator and sub-system supplier is changing with our
approach. Lastly, we provide insight into how the development of classical
applications also benefits from the holistic optimization methodology.

Robotics and automated systems used in many industries still lack sufficient standard specifications for interfaces, test methods for performance comparison, and practices for implementation. These gaps can stifle industry adoption and innovation.

The ASTM F45 Committee on Robotics, Automation, and Autonomous Systems is working to fill these gaps through the development of standard terminology, practices, classifications, guides, test methods, and specifications applicable to these systems.

This talk will include an overview presentation on the committee’s recent and upcoming activities, as well as an interactive discussion session to gather industry feedback on recommendations for future standards developments to ensure alignment with the needs of the community, both from a developer and user perspective.

Nathaniel Czarnecki, lead test engineer and head of the testing squad at Scythe, will share the philosophy behind and framework for building highly effective robotics testing programs that can grow in scope and impact without becoming burdensome to the business. This involves prioritizing which facets of the product need the most in-depth testing, identifying meaningful metrics to measure them by, and using the findings to rapidly iterate on and improve the product – all with typically limited resources and an eye toward seriously expanded testing operations.

Resulting in six generations of its mower in less than six years, Scythe’s testing program has driven step-change product and performance improvements with each iteration of M.52, as well as significant updates between them. Through stories from the test fields at Scythe (along with plenty of destructive testing videos), Nathaniel will also share best practices for testing hardware and software in tandem, creating progressive testing programs, and building the rapport needed to collaborate with teams across an organization, offering insight relevant to any robotics company.

Whether fixed in place or free to roam, driving in factories or flying through the skies, robots have become increasingly capable. They are now able to adapt, analyze, navigate, and execute complex missions – autonomy is becoming ‘solved’! But, with robotics and automation being rapidly transformed by new developments in AI, there is immense potential to unlock entirely new horizons in the field. On top of this, many related fields are going through similar evolutions. In this talk we will take a look at how companies and organizations can take advantage of these trends to shape their futures.

Our mission is to give drivers time back during their journeys and revolutionize travel for enhanced safety, reduced stress, and make driving enjoyable for all. Join this session to stay informed about how automated driving is playing a pivotal role in reshaping the future of road travel. Explore the significant challenges currently faced in the realm of autonomous mobility and understand their impact on public perception. Gain insights into Latitude AI’s efforts to develop a robust automated driving product through testing and performance tracking.

AI is being used in perception, control, and human robot interaction. Simulation has proved a pivotal tool in training and testing these AI models for robotics. This presentation delves into the cutting-edge trends and challenges at the intersection of AI and simulation. From synthetic data generation to robotics learning gyms, this talk covers the technical aspects of why the simulation-first approach is revolutionizing how robots are developed.

Behavior trees are a mechanism for representing and abstracting complex behavior for autonomous agents. While they originated in the video game industry, they have been steadily gaining popularity in robotics over the past several years. In contrast to other widely used approaches such as finite-state machines, behavior trees offer several benefits in the structure they enforce, including a relatively concise standard modeling language, ease of modification and extension, and verification guarantees.

This presentation will begin with an introduction to behavior trees, which covers the formalism, basic mechanics, and common idioms for robotics applications. We will then contrast behavior trees with alternative approaches and detail the main software packages and resources available for getting started. Finally, we will present some lessons learned from experience applying behavior trees in various robotics projects, spanning a range of application areas and academic versus commercial uses.

While robot arms have seen great adoption in manufacturing, we believe we have just begun to scratch the surface of applications in other industries and domains. In these semi-structured and unstructured environments, the technical challenges of reliably applying robot arms are much greater. But the need is enormous.

This talk will highlight how PickNik has been using advanced software approaches to lead the robotics industry in applying manipulation and grasping to some of the toughest challenges. From farm fields to ghost kitchens, subsea to outer space, we will discuss our strategies to leverage modern software (including ROS) to make robotic arm hardware more intelligent.