Thinking robot futures
Before the pandemic, you would have been forgiven for thinking robots were mostly used in the manufacturing sector (and at Amazon of course) but the crisis has both accelerated their use across a wider range of sectors. Robots are now making meaningful contributions in wildly disparate industries like fashion, food, small components manufacturing, energy, and construction. For the most part however these have been largely behind the scenes and in most cases appeared bespoke and impossibly expensive items.
Recently however we got the news that Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot Dog Now Available for $74,500. Spot and his predecessors have long been the exciting prospect and YouTube-friendly face of robotics as they have progressed over various terrains in their slightly awkward headless dog-like way. You will see Spot can now achieve plenty, as this rather selective video illustrates.
The price seems pretty expensive right now, and it probably isn’t ideal for everything your business might want a robot to do but the fact remains that based on this, CIOs and CTOs should be sitting up and taking a look at robotics if they aren’t already. If we use Moore’s law, and work on the basis that they are running at about 18 months per cycle then they will be affordable in a few years. In 5 years the price will be down to less than 10 thousand dollars – so we really need to be figuring them into our digital strategies now.
Add to that how the pandemic has affected behaviour and consumer perception and this seems all the more crucial when considering your agile digital transformation. The demands of social distancing and keeping employees safe have transformed robots from a perceived threat to ones livelihood to potential saviours, and for service industries machines have a role consumers feel much more comfortable with.
It seems while during the pandemic they have exactly taken over, there are delivery robots providing dinner to those under quarantine in China and tele-presence robots interacting with patients in the USA. In the Netherlands, one firm is pushing UV light robots as a way to clean hospitals using UV that would damage people but can disinfect all viral aerosol particles easily.
If you need to bone up on robotics, here is a run-down of some of the worlds leading robotics manufacturers and their latest creations here. If you are looking for a guide to selecting the right solution for your business then it will come down to a familiar balancing act – the capabilities of off-the-shelf vs the customisation and cost of some of the more bespoke solutions. The clever people at lux have a robotics report here that outlines the key capabilities of robots, the different types of vendors that build them, and provides an Autonomy Maturity Model that ranges from the simplest to the most advanced solutions.
Whatever your industry, the new normal includes more room for the odd robot – perhaps still running the show in warehouses for logistics operations and more, but also perhaps in restaurants for food serving, in retail spaces for temperature checks and safety, and helping doctors across the board. What role with robotics have in your digital transformation, in imagining the customer experience that will be your new normal?
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