Keynotes

The cloud has transformed many different industries, companies and applications, so why would robotics be any different? While “lifting and shifting” basic functionality such as fleet management, analytics, and workflow development to the cloud is valuable from an availability and uptime perspective, the cloud has not yet provided the truly transformative, one plus one equals three effect in robotics that it has enabled with other industries. In this session, Melonee Wise, a pioneer in autonomous mobile robots, will share innovative use cases and examples of how cloud technology and applications have changed and will continue to change the face of mobile robots.

Labor challenges and worker safety led to a rise in robot deployments in the past few years. More deployments, however, meant more integration challenges. Today, companies want their disparate robot fleets to work together. That means robots from different vendors are going to need to find common ground because their customers will demand it. Open Robotics’ Brian Gerkey will discuss how companies are addressing interoperability, and what options are available to vendors, end users, and integrators. Attendees will learn:
· The history of Open-RMF (Robotics Middleware Framework)
· Best practices in multiple vendor robot interoperability
· Future interoperability trends

The labor gap triggered by the “Silver Tsunami” presents a massive challenge to manufacturers. Thankfully, the collective effect of four convergent trends – AI, IIOT, 5G and collaborative robotics – presents companies with many options for addressing the problem, while creating new opportunities for businesses and their workforces in the process.

In this keynote session, Greg Smith, President, Industrial Automation Group at Teradyne, will discuss the market drivers of human scale automation and present a model of the market potential for collaborative robots to automate dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks freeing people from monotonous work to have more time for value-oriented activities. He will also share his vision for robotics, where people work with robots not like robots.

Business intelligence is transforming all sectors of the economy, including the fulfillment warehouse. Robotics automation for warehouse operations generates large amounts data, which when captured, revealed, and analyzed, can be put to effective use to improve business productivity. In this revelatory keynote presentation, Locus Robotics CEO Rick Falk will describe how automation solutions can provide companies with various types of key business information, a valuable and actionable resource for business planning, operations optimization, labor management and more. He will also describe how real-time dashboards on the warehouse floor, along with executive reporting tools, provides for the data-driven decision making companies require to build the operational resilience required to effectively manage disruptions and excel in the future.

The recent pandemic turned our world outside down, professionally and personally. It also created opportunities for businesses and inspired engineers to think differently so they could bring innovative and life-saving products to market faster than ever before. Whether it was building robots that clean airports, cobot welders that meet staffing shortages or robots that bring food to waitstaff, designers were successfully leveraging digital product development platforms to collaborate globally, while working remotely.

Now that we are operating in a hybrid work environment, at least for the foreseeable future, how can companies and roboticists continue to leverage the product development ecosystem to accelerate innovation?

In this session, Jon Hirschtick will share:

· His entrepreneurial journey and how he continues to empower innovators
· Engineering best practices and lessons learned
· What’s next for product development and how companies can maintain a competitive edge
· How educators can prepare the next generation of engineers to meet the demands of today’s hyper-connected era

In this forward-looking keynote session, Kevin Blankespoor, Boston Dynamics’ Senior Vice President of Warehouse Robotics, will provide attendees with an update on how agile, mobile robots are currently being used at industrial sites and warehouses. Use cases in the construction, oil & gas, and energy industries highlighting Boston Dynamics’ high-mobility quadruped Spot robot will be provided. Blankespoor will also discuss how vision-enabled mobile robots can be utilized for unloading trucks and shipping containers. He will describe how Boston Dynamics’ second product, Stretch, which is purpose built for case handling in warehouses, automates the critical and difficult process of truck unloading, while delivering a number of technical, business and social benefits in the process.