The Junction Box: Why Automate 2019 should change your PR campaign
26 April 2019
In a new column, exclusive to Connectivity, Richard Stone, the founder of Stone Junction – the first PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, recounts the robotics and automation trends from Chicago’s Automate show that have got him on the edge of his seat with excitement.
Along with 20,000 other members of the world’s automation illuminati, some of the team from Stone Junction attended the Automate show in Chicago earlier this month. We were there to facilitate meetings between our clients and the journalists, analysts and trade bodies they wanted to meet. But we also found time to pick up on some of the key issues that were the talk of the show.
Not only that, but we squeezed in some deep-dish pizza, sightseeing and a very tiny amount of jazz. But that’s another story entirely…
Mobile robots
You literally couldn’t move for mobile robots at Automate, which is true of nearly every automation show for the last couple of years. The difference here was that you weren’t just being tripped up by irritating prototype service-robots and a certain automation company’s leaflet-delivering droid (you know who you are, and we love the little guy really). There was a genuine mobile collaborative robot application on the stand of pretty much every robot vendor at the show.
For the uninitiated, imagine an AGV or autonomous mobile robot, with a collaborative robot arm mounted on top, and you are pretty much there. The key benefit is the flexibility to be able to deploy and redeploy the robot wherever you wish.
We even saw very heavy-duty versions of this technology, for use in the aerospace sector and the machining of heavy components. In fairness, we did also fall over a few irritating prototype service robots.
This could impact the PR and marketing campaign of everyone from bearing and gear manufacturers and distributers to suppliers of electric motors, actuators, sensors and vision systems. Rejoice, the world of automation has gifted us another brilliant content theme!
Interoperability
From charging hardware designed to work with any AGV or drone, to software intended for use on any manufacturer’s industrial robot, interoperability was the word on everybody’s lips in Chicago. Great examples could be found on the stands of Southie Autonomy, Realtime Robotics and the German company ArtiMinds.
Southie Autonomy, in its own words, builds, “intelligent robot software that enables any industrial robot to be re-purposed and re-deployed by any person, without robotics expertise or even computer skills”. Using augmented reality as a human machine interface and an AI engine to allow the robot to programme itself, the company promises to reduce integration time to next to nothing.
ArtiMinds offers a similar result in a different way, using its programming suite to deliver a robot that can go from unboxing to operational in record times, thanks to intuitive point and click functionality.
If all that wasn’t exciting enough, Boston’s Realtime Robotics promises to make any robot collaborative and any collaborative robot faster, using robot, sensor and application-agnostic technology. The core of the system is a piece of software called RapidPlan Motion Planning Accelerator (MPA), which the company claims can determine collision-free paths in milliseconds.
All these new technologies generate new marketing potential for robot suppliers, as well as suppliers of components for robots. Above all, it demonstrates that the bombardment of super cool new tech we’ve seen since that fateful day in 2011, when the German government first said the apocryphal words Industry 4.0, shows no sign of stopping. And isn’t that great – there’s never been a better time to be in automation.
Richard Stone is the founder of Stone Junction, the first PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. He loves robots, deep-dish pizza and getting phone calls, so give him a buzz on +44 (0) 1785 225416.
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