Tag Archive for: robotics

Robotics

Jama Software is always on the lookout for news and content to benefit and inform our industry partners. As such, we’ve curated a series of articles that we found insightful. In this blog post, we share content sourced from Supply Chain Dive – Robotics and Automation Go Mainstream  – which was originally published on January 25, 2022, by Jen A. Miller.

Robotics and Automation Go Mainstream

Editor’s note: This article is the latest in a series that looks into the ways supply chains, warehouses and manufacturing facilities are investing in technology. Here’s the previous story.

Robots are often in the news for sensational reasons: The Boston Dynamics robot dog impersonates Mick Jagger; a Spider-Man “stuntronic” flies over Disneyland visitors.

But in supply chain, robotics and automation have gone from something radical, even fringe, to mainstream.

“It’s considered low risk. And, pretty soon, it’s going to be table stakes for operations within supply chain, where 10 years ago it was considered either cutting, or bleeding edge, or risky,” said Jeff Christensen, vice president of product at Seegrid.

Annual installations of industrial robots will jump from 450,000 a year in 2015 to 600,000 in 2022, according to a McKinsey projection. The firm also predicted that 10% of today’s manufacturing processes will be replaced by additive manufacturing by 2030.

A confluence of factors — including the pandemic, labor shortages, and technology maturing at the right time — is pushing robotics ahead in 2021 and beyond.

Robotics mature, along with AI

Like most technologies, robots became more widespread when they improved as a technology, and when they dropped in price.

The introduction of the robots-as-a-service model has allowed enterprises to supplement their operations when they need help, or try adding robots without having to make a major capital investment.

“Pretty soon, [robotics and automation are] going to be table stakes for operations within supply chain.”

Jeff Christensen, Vice President of Product at Seegrid

The progression of artificial intelligence has also helped, said Christensen. The sheer amount of data being collected changes what’s possible. What people can do on any computing device today is vastly different than 10 or 20 years ago.

Better robots, better sensors and AI “have hit the maturity threshold at the right time, at the time the market demands what it needs to do,” Christensen said. “That doesn’t always happen. Lots of time there is technology that comes to maturity in a vacuum or in a lab with no real key demand for it.”

Related: Regulatory Shift for Machine Learning in Software as a Medical Device (SaMD)

A pandemic push

Right now, there is demand: increased e-commerce business, labor shortages, truck driver shortages and instability in the supply chain has robots stepping up to the plate, especially when it comes to building resiliency.

In the 2021 MHI Annual Industry Report, 53% of the more than 1,000 supply chain professionals surveyed said they were increasing or substantially increasing their investment in robotics and automation to make the supply chain more resilient. The study also found that 38% have robotics and automation in use today and an additional 38% predict it will be in use within five years.

How businesses plan to step up robotics investments


The need for efficiency and error reduction is pushing robotics and automation in manufacturing, too, especially for companies working on the COVID-19 response.

The pandemic has put a “particular strain” on diagnostics companies, Samantha Betancourt, vice president of supply chain and external operations at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, said via email.

“We are seeing our volumes increase at the same time we may have to limit the number of people in a facility. That made us realize we need to find more creative ways to ensure we could continue to move our products even when [we’re] limited by the ability to physically touch the products,” Betancourt wrote.

She said assigning tasks to robots also allows their team members “to be thought leaders,” which is critical right now. “Employees can focus on strategic work and leave repetitive activities, whether in a spreadsheet or in a warehouse, to robotics.”

Related: Automotive Engineering and Management Methods for Modern Vehicle Development – Implementing Functional Safety for Autonomous Driving

Overcoming hurdles to adoption

While robots are becoming more common, they’re still new and “with anything new, there needs to be time to build trust,” wrote Betancourt.

“Until team members are used to working alongside robots and can truly trust their work product, oversight adds additional tasks,” she said.

Not every company has the money to make a capital investment right now, either. That, plus concerns about maintenance and upkeep costs, are keeping companies on the sidelines, said Bill Ferrell, supply chain professor and associate dean of the Graduate School at Clemson University.

Seeing successful applications in other enterprises will help, Ferrell added. He pointed to autonomous forklifts already being used in warehouses and Walmart’s roll out of autonomous trucks.

“We’re starting to see the beginning of applications and implementation in the real world,” he said. “It’s not to scale yet but it’s not that far in the future.”


The agriculture industry is one of the world’s largest and most impactful. The $5 trillion industry composes 10% of global consumer spending and 40% of employment, according to McKinsey.

It also represents 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is responsible for untold volumes of toxins and herbicides being put into the soil and water table.

It’s tackling those environmental issues that inspired Blue River Technology founder Jorge Heraud to start his company, which was recently acquired by John Deere for $305 million just six years after its founding.

Heraud and his small team spent countless hours perfecting “See & Spray” technology — a system that teaches machines to differentiate between weeds and crops, and precisely deliver a small but lethal dose of herbicide to remove the offending plants. This preserves the crops while, at the same time, greatly reducing the amount of toxic chemicals needed to keep weeds at bay, reducing their use by 90%, according to Wired.

At the same time, the system constantly gathers data about the crops it’s working with, making adjustments as needed and ensuring that only the smallest necessary amount of herbicides are used.

How See & Spray Works

See & Spray technology is fitted onto tractors like standard weed spraying machinery, but it’s also equipped with an array of cameras and machine-learning software. This enables it to tell the difference between weeds and crops, and actually improve performance as it learns. The system is so precise, in fact, that it can tell the difference between cotton plants and weeds in 30 milliseconds.

See & Spray isn’t Blue River Technology’s first foray into automated crop equipment. It saw great success with its LettuceBot, which is deployed on fields where young lettuce plants grow. The bot initiates a sort of controlled Darwinism, not only eliminating weeds, but actually thinning out the lettuce it deems too small to be viable and creating space for the larger, stronger plants to thrive. Today, 1/5 of all lettuce grown in the United States has been thinned by a LettuceBot, according to Bloomberg.

The development of See & Spray technology wasn’t without its early hiccups either. Initial models experienced issues during the testing phase like leaking nozzles, which dripped concentrated fertilizer on acres upon acres of seedlings on test fields in Arkansas.

In response to this problem, Heraud and his team added a fail-safe automatic abort function, which stops any nozzle that flows for more than five seconds. To make things right with the farmers whose crops they killed, the company thinned their next 100 acres for free.

A Greener Future

A major side-effect of agriculture’s reliance on (and less-than-judicious use of) weed-killer is one of the reasons innovations like Blue River Technology’s has caught the eye of big farming companies.

Weeds are hardy plants, and they’ve developed resistance to commercial weed killer like Roundup at an alarming rate. According to Bloomberg, in 2008, there were 10 million acres of Roundup-resistant weeds. By 2012, there were 30 million, and today there are 70 million acres, an area about the size of Nevada.

The $28 billion herbicide industry is unlikely to go down without a fight, but, perhaps surprisingly, even some of the biggest names in the business were early investors in Blue River Technology, including Monsanto Growth Ventures and Syngenta Ventures.

The first See & Spray bots are expected to hit the US in 2020, with Europe following a year later. Reducing agriculture’s reliance on haphazardly deployed toxic chemicals to thin crops and kill weeds will benefit our world in many ways. That includes a cleaner, less chemically tainted food supply, fewer toxins seeping into the world’s waterways and the preservation of aquatic and amphibious species.

As Heraud told Bloomberg, “Robots don’t have to take us away from nature — they can help us restore it.”

Learn how teams are strengthening their development process for complex products such as robotics with our white paper, “Better Product Development: Five Tips for Traceability.”

Robots becoming part of everyday life used to conjure an image of Rosie, the Jetson’s maid that played a central role in the futuristic family’s life. In modern day, however, we’re more likely to think of Roombas in our homes, or robotic surgery in hospitals. Advances are taking place that are bringing robots more and more into our daily lives. Drone flight ranges are increasing, as are the loads they carry, land robots are able to move faster, and artificial prosthetics can mimic body movements unlike ever before. Even with all this progress, the robotics industry faces some major challenges.

Interoperability

Artificial intelligence is being developed for many different types of robotics, at the same time, the specialization of these robots is also developed. One robot is programmed to detect cancer cells from a series of images taken by a doctor, another is made to translate language from English to Spanish. Both are unable to operate outside of those limitations with any generalized intelligence. The need for a higher level of AI from specialized to generalized intelligence is emerging, in order to support multiple robots and their systems communicating and working together to accomplish a common goal. Multiple robots or systems working together will increase the overall complexity of development, but also yield greater potential value for those that successfully develop them.

Trust

After autopilot functions were installed in Tesla Model S vehicles, the crash rate was reduced by 40%. While the study shows that it is safer to let the vehicle function autonomously, many are still reluctant to give up personal control to a machine. Thinking about handing over control to a robot prompts the question: will a robot be able to make moral decisions? If the goal of the robot is to clean a table, but there is an expensive centerpiece in its way, would it reason that the centerpiece is more important? Likewise, if a car is driving and a child runs into the street (detected as an object), would it prioritize the safety of the child over the safety of the vehicle? Successful testing is already a critical part of the development of many products, but it takes on deeper significance when lives are at stake.

Legislating Robotics

As robotics become intertwined in our daily lives, new laws and regulations will be needed to govern them. Already problems have arisen with personal drones, and lack of legislation is causing hiccups in the progress of autonomous vehicles hitting the market. European Parliament is working on draft legislation to encourage the establishment of EU-wide rules around intelligent robots and AI. Legislation will have implications not only for how we interact with robots, but also for the companies developing them.

For more on robotics as they relate to autonomous driving, read our conversation with John Blyler of PSU and Bill Chow of INCOSE and Mentor Graphics.