July 26, 2022

We’re taking a departure from our normal areas of influence and discussing the presence and growth of robotics in Manufacturing! Join us as this month as we discuss all things manufacturing: the move from AGVs to AMRs/IMRs, challenges about scaling in manufacturing environments, and how acceptance in industry is going as we continue on our path to the future.

May 31, 2022

Have you sent your robots out into the world, on their own, and then struggled to know exactly what they’re doing? Does your product improvement rely primarily on reports from customers? Have you ever had a robot go “dark” in the field? So have most of us!

March 01, 2022

Robots don’t just drop into the real world and start performing their best. They need some sort of physical infrastructure, especially chargers. Many thrive on integration into customer WMS, ERP, or similar systems. Your customer’s employees will often need to make changes to their workflows, ranging from small tweaks to completely different workdays. Listen in as our community discusses this important part of scaling our robotic fleets.

January 25, 2022

As robot deployments scale from 5 to 5,000, the way robots are tasked changes from ad hoc to structured and from individual tasks to more comprehensive missions. In this meeting, we delved into the details of how robots are told what to do across different applications, what a “mission” means in different contexts, and how to manage hundreds or thousands of missions per day across a whole fleet.

November 30, 2021

For this meeting, we had a great guest speaker, Aaron Turrner. He is an expert in cybersecurity, with decades of experience and accolades.

October 26, 2021

Robots will break. As your fleet grows, your robots will experience failures. These can be very small or very large, but regardless of impact, you need to learn from these. How do you do it, and how can you improve your fleet in a timely way?

In this meeting, we discussed how to leverage failure in your fleet to make it stronger over time.

September 28, 2021

For this month’s ROG Meetup, we went in depth into the topic of teleoperation and telemanipulation. We discussed:

What is possible?
What are the use cases?
When are they appropriate?
How do we deal with safety?

Leading the discussion was James Davidson. James is working on Talos, a remotely operated platform to train and supervise industrial robots. He was previously co-founder and CTO at Third Wave Automation and worked at Google on Brain Robotics.

August 31, 2021

In this ROG meeting, we heard about how OhmniLabs deployed and supported 100 robots for virtual attendees at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, enabling remote presence for media and VIP attendees who were not able to attend in person due to COVID restrictions.

July 27, 2021

Special Guest Aaron Prather, a thought leader in the AMR space, led the conversation on where the industry is headed and how FedEx is embracing robots. With nearly 25 years at FedEx, Aaron Prather has developed and deployed numerous technology applications across the FedEx enterprise. In his current role as Senior Advisor, Technology Planning & Research, Prather leads efforts to find and deploy new technologies into FedEx operations, including robotics and automation.

June 29, 2021

Robots don’t work in a vacuum (well, ok, maybe the space robots do.) There are usually internal or customer systems and other robots that have to not just co-exist but work collaboratively. In this session, we will discuss various approaches, including some emerging industry standards, that aim to facilitate system-wide operations.Description goes here

May 25, 2021

Discussion around how to effectively detect and respond to incidents in the field.

April 20, 2021

In this session we were joined by Leo Chen and Lawrence Ibarria of Verdant Robotics.

March 16, 2021

We focused on Configuration Management and the associated challenges.

Erin Rapacki-Bishop, Senior PMM Robotics & Isaac Sim, NVIDIA

Companies in the commercial and industrial sectors are increasingly turning to robotics automation to reduce costs, improve productivity, and increase operational efficiency. Companies in the consumer sector, too, have turned to robotics technologies to drive their businesses, releasing new products and robotizing existing offerings. Developing these systems, however, is a complex, challenging, and costly undertaking. Thankfully, advanced simulation tools are available to engineers that can speed the design, development, and testing of robotics systems.

Rory M. Gagon, President & CEO, Romaric Corporation

Deploying an automated solution involving robotic devices to handle material in a manufacturing or warehouse environment can be a high-cost and high-risk operation.

Learn why so many simulation projects fail to properly provide necessary and accurate data, leading to disappointment, frustration, and excuses on all sides after moving unto the production phase of a simulated system. Join industry veteran Rory Gagon, CEO & President of Romaric Corporation as he shares his experience with simulation and emulation in complex automated material handling environments.

Felipe Garcia Lopez, Head of Robotic Systems & Software Engineering at Kärcher

With Kira B 50, Kärcher has launched its first full autonomy scrubber drier cleaning robot in the spring of 2022. We will discuss lessons learned in building RobOps teams and workflows to address the challenges of scaling a fleet of autonomous robots in different countries and a variety of target environments: from industrial manufacturing and warehouses to public spaces like retail stores, shopping malls and airports. We'll also address the importance of field experience and performance transparency in order to maintain an ever-evolving software stack and growing robot capabilities.

Cynthia Bell, Senior Manager, Customer Support, Locus Robotics

John Simmons, Head of Product, InOrbit 

Deploying robots into production environments is a complicated and time consuming problem.  Autonomous navigation, robot localization, and integration with legacy automation systems are all common technical challenges that must be overcome.  Then, after the initial proof of technology / use case has been proven, an entirely new set of challenges is encountered:  How to scale?  This presentation will explore the lessons learned from scaling a fleet of retail inventory robots from 5 locations to over 500 and will highlight how those lessons can be applied generally to succeed at scale.  

Daniel Theobald, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Vecna Robotics

The global autonomous mobile robot (AMR) and Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) market is expected to reach $14 billion by 2026, with more than 270 vendors leading the manufacturing and logistics space and over 50,000 warehouses worldwide expected to leverage robots by 2025. However, fleets of robots from multiple vendors work on different operating systems and historically have had no standard way to communicate, share information or coordinate activities – until now.  

In addition to the discussion during each session, RobOpsCon enabled opportunities for serendipity. Rich exchange of ideas occurred among interested parties during breakfast, lunch and reception, as well as multiple breaks during the day. The event also had two open mic sessions, allowing any participant to get the floor for impromptu discussions on relevant topics. These sessions could not be captured, but the following video provides a sense of the engagement between attendees.