ROBOTS & HUMANS: THE FUTURE IS NOW @CLAUS LENZ

1. HUMANS & ROBOTS -
THE FUTURE IS NOW
DR. CLAUS LENZ
BLUE OCEAN ROBOTICS GMBH

2. INDUSTRIAL ROBOTS
▸ Machines with two or more programmable axes
▸ Mainly robot arms with 6 axes (DOFs)
▸ First robots appeared over 60 years ago
▸ Development mainly driven by automotive sector
▸ Universal, multi-purpose machines supplement special
machine designs
▸ Often:
▸ robot arms are holding very complex, specific tools

3. INDUSTRIAL ROBOTS
▸ Highly automated production
▸ Off-line programmed robots work on their own
▸ Strict separation of workspaces between robots and
humans

4. PRODUCTION
CAN YOU IMAGE A WORLD WITHOUT INDUSTRIAL ROBOTS?

5. CURRENT TREND - ROBOT CO-WORKERS
▸ Integration of (industrial) robots in
human dominated areas of production
▸ flexible and optimized assembly of
products with high variety
▸ support of human worker
▸ Combining skills of humans and robots
▸ robot and human work safely
together on a complex assembly task
as a team

6. CURRENT TREND - LOGISTICS
‣ Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR)
‣ Automated warehouses
‣ Cope with high growth of e-commerce
‣ Logistic automation in
‣ Manufacturing
‣ Hospitals, care homes
‣ Facility management
‣ Drones (Amazon, DHL, ...)

7. ROBOTS ARE MORE THAN THAT

8. 2006:
„A ROBOT IN EVERY HOME“
Bill Gates

9. 2006: „A ROBOT IN EVERY HOME“ BY BILL GATES
▸ Compares development of robots with the development
of the PC
▸ Main Challenges:
▸ Lack of common standards and plattforms
▸ Lack of Perception and cognitive abilities
▸ Missing Software tools and ability to reuse code
è This has heavily changed

10. 2016 – THE TURNING POINT

11. 2016 – THE TURNING POINT

12. 2016 – THE TURNING POINT

13. 2016 – THE TURNING POINT

14. 2016 – THE TURNING POINT

15. MORE (CONSUMER) ROBOTS
Household
Personal Assistants
Consumer Service
Telepresence
Education
Sex

16. IMPORTANT DRIVERS
‣ Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and machine
learning
‣ Connectivity of devices (IoT), communication bandwidth and
computational power
‣ Cheap and high quality sensors
‣ Advances in machine vision and speech recognition
capabilities
‣ Advances in manipulation capabilites
è consumer robots are getting smarter and better companions
for humans, beyond being just helpers

17. ROBOTS ARE CHANGING OUR LIFES
ALREADY!

18. BEING REPLACED BY A ROBOT?
‣ Machines are beginning to take over
more and more tasks
à cognitive tasks and analytic tasks
‣ Controverse discussion:
èRobots will eliminate 6% of all US
jobs by 2021
è People will work more
independently and create new
business ideas and models
Forrester’s Brian Hopkins
Erik Brynjolfsson

19. WHAT ABOUT THE MONKEY?

20. WHAT ABOUT THE MONKEY?
‣ Robotics is a perfect match to the playful monkey!
‣ We need to continue to ask Questions and use our creativity!
‣ Robots are still very poor at asking insightful questions.
‣ By automating tasks, we are liberating human imagination and the human
spirit.
‣ The more we unlock the secrets of technology, the more we‘ll find ourselves.

21. THANK YOU!