Company makes industrial robots more human

Company makes industrial robots more human

A frequent cliché about robot is that their movements are stiff and abrupt, a picture that was characterized primarily by the "robot dance" that became popular in the 1980s. But since then, robots have developed a lot and have now shown much more human properties with more gentler and more subtle movements. However, this mainly applies to humanoid robots that have been a tiny minority compared to the industrial robots that have been producing our products - such as cars - for decades.

robot in industry

around 3 million robots work in factories worldwide, with about a third of which working in the automotive industry, Such an industry organization . The Micropsi Industries company now also wants to make industrial robots of human -equal. "We develop a control system that enables industrial robots to do things that you could not do without our software," says Ronnie Vuine, the founder of Micropsi. "It is essentially about having eye-to-hand coordination and adapting to changed conditions in the area while doing their work in a factory."

innovative solutions with artificial intelligence

The first product of the company, Mirai, uses artificial intelligence (AI) and cameras to train robots for tasks that would be impossible with conventional, preprogrammed movements.

vuine was interested in the Humboldt University in Berlin for AI in the 2000s. "There was a working group that was interested in how machines in the real world learn when there is no engineer to say what to do. They have to find out what to do to survive. How would you do that? That was our research focus."

The rise of Micropsi Industries

At that point, AI was still largely out of date. But when Google bought the AI ​​company Deep Mind in 2014, the team became clear how Ki became mainstream and motivated them to continue to advance. Micropsi was founded in the same year.

The company is now developing its products for various brands of manufacturing robots. "The automotive industry is the most advanced industry when scaling robots," says Vuine. "Cars are the most complex product that we produce in large quantities. Airplanes are also more complex, but we don't produce so many of them. Cars are simply the play of the most progressive automation we play."

Technologiedemonstration by Mirai

In a demonstration of the technology, Mirai allowed a robot arm to grab a thin computer cable from the hand of a person and put it into a switch. This is a filigree task that is considered too difficult to manually program a robot. Vuine explains that Mirai can teach the robot to do this with a human tutor for about an hour. After that, the robot can do the task independently by using cameras and lights to see what it does. "Of course, the cable wobbles so that you cannot predict exactly where it is, but the robot will take it reliably and then insert it," he says.

Automation and future prospects

This opens up opportunities for automation to take on tasks that were previously done by humans. This could be particularly useful for the production of electric cars. "The automotive industry changes to electrical drives. There are many more cables that need to be inserted," says Vuine. "Of course, it is extremely important in the electronics where you have flat cables to connect to circuit boards. All of these applications could not be implemented with robots beforehand. You had to use a person or could not be implemented and had to implement the product for the production."

global expansion and future applications

After the company recently moved its headquarters from Berlin to San Francisco, it is now looking for opportunities to extend from cars to other products such as power tools and household appliances, as well as other areas, especially logistics. In the future, the system could also drive humanoid robots. "The software that controls the robot could be used very well outside a factory for a service robot that flushes your dishes," explains Vuine. "In fact, we sometimes also carry out playful demos who demonstrate these skills."

The challenges in robotics

The hurdle for this expansion is not the software itself, he adds, but the robots themselves. "Robots are not made of soft material like humans. They are made of metal, so it hurts a lot when they meet one. You have to do a very carefully and plan a lot of security, and lo and behold, you have created a machine that is too expensive and too unwieldy to actually live in your home. We have not yet solved this."