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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.”

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 – 11 Technologies Shape Smart Warehouse Manufacturing – which was originally published on January 31, 2022 by Edwin Lopez.

11 Technologies to Shape Smart Operations

Smart technology has been around for well over a decade, but a look at recent survey data suggests the pace of change is picking up — particularly in warehouses and manufacturing facilities.

It’s a change that was happening pre-pandemic. But continued worker shortages and supply chain disruptions have accelerated technology adoption over the past two years, according to John Paxton, CEO of MHI.

For the past nine years, MHI has been surveying materials handling professionals and asking them how likely their facility is to implement a series of technologies. Each year, there are new adoption trends, shifts in use cases, and evidence some technologies may be more hype than ripe for use.

11 technologies enter facilities, but adoption rates vary

% of survey respondents who said they are using the following technologies within facility operations.

“One thing we have learned over the past nine years we have been producing the MHI Annual Industry Report is that supply chains are becoming more and more a technology-driven industry,” Paxton said in an email.

Some technologies are on the fast-track with supply chains: cloud computing, AI and IoT come to mind. Others, like 3D printing or blockchain, are struggling to show a business case. Overall, Paxton said two factors — disruption and consumer demand — are driving the adoption of technology.

“What we expect to see over the next few years is really a revolution in the adoption of these technologies,” said Paxton.

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Companies can’t stop at investments in IoT devices. They’ll also need a way to integrate and capitalize on the data.

Robotics, automation go from fringe to mainstream ➔

Pretty soon, the technologies are going to be table stakes for supply chain operations, one executive said.

‘Too much data’ drives adoption, expectations of predictive analytics ➔

Demand forecasting and supply planning are among the top uses for the technology, but the upfront expense doesn’t make sense for every business.

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Wearable technology offers a treasure trove of data for supply chain managers. But the question remains how to translate the data into decisions.

As we enter a new decade of technological advancements, Jama Software asked select thought leaders from various industries for the trends and events they foresee unfolding over the next 10 years.

In the fifth installment of our 2020s Predictions series, we’re featuring software testing predictions from Ricardo Camacho, Technical Product Marketing Manager at LDRA.

Jama Software: What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in software testing and how are they impacting product development?

Ricardo Camacho: I’m seeing a continued trend in the embracing of test automation. Not just to keep pace with the adoption and refinement in DevOps and Agile practices, but also due to increasing demands in software safety and security which is of great concern in today’s world. Each industry has different challenges, so different needs or focuses in test automation solutions are being sought.

One example of this is in the automotive industry, and particularly in the Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) – a prime example of a complex and evolutionary type of system. Here you have development of advanced magnetics position sensor in the electronic power steering application, and there are other sensors like speed, inertial, and image which factor into that ecosystem.

These systems are also distributed systems and the components are being provided by different suppliers with different software stacks, using different software development methodologies made up of millions of lines of code. Test automation by way of adhering to a common coding standard for product development for all suppliers establishes a standard platform. In other words, a universal software development platform for vehicle software across all suppliers that address safety, security, and defect-free product goals. Not only have some automotive companies developed their own coding standards to enforce this, but we also see it by the movement and merger of MISRA and the AUTOSAR industry standards.

JS: Are there any technological advancements that you are seeing in software testing

RC: I’m seeing the emerging use of Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for software testing, which continues to evolve and will make an enormous impact. Today, in most organizations, thousands of test cases are created, many are redundant, and some have defects. Also, test scripts are not intelligent enough to determine state conditions of the system under test, so sleep or wait instructions need to be added to properly fulfill testing needs. The interdependencies between test scripts further adds more complexity which tends to cause test failures and script changes. Furthermore, some testing continues to require human interaction, or visual inspection, which makes it error prone. So, AI is the next evolutionary step in software testing.

Artificial intelligence provides many efficiencies and fills many of the missing gaps in software testing. One of the biggest impacts will be through spidering. Where the AI will crawl the application, collecting data and even taking screen shots to learn about the expected behavior of the application. The AI can then compare future runs to known patterns, exposing deviations quickly. AI similarly addresses Application Program Interface (API) testing by recording and mocking responses which significantly reduces the time it takes to perform API testing. Additionally, AI is not limited to just text comparisons in validation. AI can validate all types of data (e.g. video, audio, images).

Therefore, with AI’s help, more robust and reliable test cases are produced and in less time. AI improves test coverage, accuracy, and provides superior insight into the health of the application. AI is bringing a transformation in software testing and it’s here in the horizon. Thus, 2020 will bring forward these types of needed solutions.

Learn how Jama Software is partnering with LDRA to deliver a test validation and verification solution for safety- and security-critical embedded software by watching this video.

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.”

After kicking off with a rare torrential downpour in Las Vegas that forced even Google to seek shelter, the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show — better known as CES — officially concluded on Jan. 12.

CES is an annual tech-stravoganza where companies large and small descend on Sin City to unveil their latest innovations.

Although the booths and displays have been taken down and packed up, the products and technology unveiled throughout the week will undoubtedly shape the coming years across many sectors.

Here are some quick highlights, and stay tuned for a look at CES 2018 announcements from the autonomous vehicle sector later this week.

Artificial Intelligence

Any direction you looked in Las Vegas last week, chances are you saw the words “Hey Google” (the Google Home wake word) festooned on everything from billboards to the Las Vegas monorail.

Google’s voice-powered smart home assistant is clearly giving Amazon’s Alexa a run for its money in spite of its first-mover advantage.

Alexa was also a prominent player at CES this year as well, with devices ranging from watches to robots to home appliances and yes, even toilets, starting to incorporate Amazon’s proprietary AI engine.

Elsewhere, while Samsung used the event to show off the latest version of its smart home assistant, Bixby, AI like Apple’s Siri/HomeKit and Microsoft’s Cortana were all but unseen, according to numerous reports.

This means Apple and Microsoft may have some serious ground to make up — at least, in terms of perception — as CES 2018 cemented Amazon and Google’s dominance in the space.

Consumer Electronics

The concept of a smart home is morphing beyond voice-enabled speakers and smart thermostats. Based on some of the reveals at CES this year, it won’t be long before every room in the house is equipped with some form of AI smarts.

Kohler’s Verdera smart mirror was on display at CES, which brings the full suite of Amazon’s Alexa voice controls to your bathroom. The Verdera enables voice control like other smart home devices, including adjusting lights and temperature, playing music, and more, all during your morning routine.

Also featured by Kohler was its DTV Prompt, a smart showerhead (also Alexa-enabled, no surprise there) that allows you to, using voice control, turn on your shower, adjust the flow and temperature, and even create pre-set personalized shower setting profiles for multiple-member households.

LG showed off its ThinQ smart refrigerator, a smart fridge that seems straight out of the future. The ThinQ has a 29-inch touchscreen display running WebOS that becomes transparent with two knocks, enabling users to see inside the fridge without opening the door. It also lets you enter your food’s expiration dates, which triggers reminders when something is about to spoil or when you’re running low on supply. It’s even got a camera inside the fridge so you can view its contents remotely, putting an end to the “do we have any butter?” questions at the supermarket.

Health and Wellness

CES 2018 was also a big showcase for some exciting emerging technology in the health space, much of it focusing on giving patients the ability to more efficiently monitor their well-being and even self-diagnose.

The EyeQue Insight, for example, is a viewer and mobile app that lets people test their own vision. Insight uses the same test done in an eye doctor’s office except on mobile phones, which the company told ExtremeTech lets people determine whether or not they need glasses, or whether their need to make updates to an existing prescription.

Eargo is making a run at the hearing aid business. The company’s on-site audiologists determine whether the user needs a hearing aid, and when the device arrives at your home, it’s already properly tuned, charged and ready to wear. It also incorporates fiber materials and an innovative fit, making it nearly invisible when worn.

Sleep is a cornerstone of good health, and the Nokia Sleep is looking to give you a detailed look at your body’s functions as you hit the hay, utilizing smart sensors and a mobile app to track everything from heart rate and breathing patterns to snoring.

The resulting data is then crunched, giving you a “sleep score” and even estimating how much deep, restful REM sleep you get in a typical evening. It can also be integrated into home automation devices to adjust lighting or temperature to optimize your slumber.

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.