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Can I help you with that? Why the future of retail is robotic

Anyone who’s visited a Currys recently – or perhaps a Decathlon in Spain or even a Lowe’s store in the San Francisco Bay Area – may already have encountered a retail robot.

These few examples mark the start of something huge on the high street if a forecast by tech analyst ABI Research is to be believed. Last year it predicted that the annual revenue of the emerging sector providing retail robotics could exceed $8.4bn (£6.9bn) by 2030, so perhaps we’d better get used to the idea of seeing more silicon-based shop staff.

Robotics, and automation more generally, represent an opportunity for retailers as they wrestle with the constant challenge of managing the omnichannel experiences they offer while their costs rise and shoppers’ habits change. This technology was first used by the retail industry in back-office functions such as warehousing, but it has been adopted more recently for last-mile fulfilment – Co-op’s use of home delivery robots from Starship Technologies, for instance – and assistance on the shopfloor.

RPA’s day has come – the intelligent evolution of a productivity bot

Global spending on robotic process automation (RPA) software is expected to reach $2.9bn this year, according to Gartner, cementing the idea that the machines are here to take our jobs, but are thankfully focused on the boring, yet necessary repetitive tasks. But is this all about to change? Could RPA be about to be phased out, or does it still have a future?

According to Varsha Mehta, senior market research specialist at Gartner, providers of RPA software are now “pushing beyond a traditional single technology-focused offering to a more advanced suite of tools”. This includes low-code application platforms, process mining, task mining, decision modelling and integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The aim, suggests Mehta, is to create “hyper-automation-enabling platforms”.

Customers, understandably, want more bang for their buck. Big data has given organisations analytical headaches that, to a certain extent, are being eased by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But where artificial intelligence and machine learning give organisations insight into operational and market patterns, customer habits and financial modelling, for example, RPA provides the “how”.

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Computer Weekly

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Skin in the game. How a start-up is cracking one of the biggest challenges in robotics

Imagine a robot working in a field delicately picking strawberries, with the dexterity and soft touch of a human. Or a robot carefully handling nuclear waste materials with no damage from high radiation levels. Or a robot that has such a sensitive sense of touch that it can be used to tend vulnerable, post-operation hospital patients. For Dr Zaki Hussein, CEO and founder of Touchlab, these are all within the realms of possibility, thanks to the development of an e-skin that can replicate human touch.

Touchlab, which has just received a £3.5m injection of cash from early-stage investor Octopus Ventures, has created an e-skin that is thinner than human skin and yet, according to Hussein, can already withstand extreme environments, such as acid and high and low temperatures. Although robot skins are not new, one of the biggest remaining challenges for robot makers was the ability to create a human-like sensitive skin that, for one, would enable a more measured grip of objects.

According to Hussein, Touchlab’s e-skin uses just four wires (each the size of a human hair) to create a customisable material capable of measuring touch, force and position. It can be wrapped around new or existing robots and even works in conjunction with human tele-operated avatars.

The idea was borne out of Hussein’s initial PhD research into electronic skin, developing deformable patches to deliver drugs or get diagnostics on patients. This led to the creation of Touchlab. Currently based at the Higgs Centre for Innovation at The Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, the company plans to move to The National Robotarium, a centre for leading research and development in AI and robotics. It’s a clear indication of its future intentions, to collaborate and grow within an ecosystem of robotics start-ups and leading researchers.

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IDG Connect

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Robotics accelerates towards new dawn of enterprise automation

Insolvencies loom large, according to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) recent report into the global economy. As governments ease their financial support for businesses, we are already seeing redundancies across a number of sectors, including retail, travel, hospitality, entertainment and manufacturing. With so many businesses grinding to a halt over the past few months and now looking to re-ignite interest in a difficult economy, they could be forgiven for trying to re-imagine how they operate and how, in the immediate future, they will survive, let alone grow.

Understandably, interest in robotics is growing, as advances in robotics and robotic process automation (RPA) technologies accelerate. Manufacturing, in particular the motor industry, has traditionally been a leading sector for robotics but now interest is spreading across industries and that includes some unusual applications. The ICE+FRIES bar in Iceland’s capital Reykjavik, for example, with its robot cocktail maker Toni, the robotic restaurant start-up Karakuri, or Spot the robot dog from Boston Dynamics, that patrolled Singapore’s Bishan-Ang Moh Kio Park back in May, reminding people to maintain social distancing. All illustrate the increasing breadth of automated technology but for most organisations, robotics will drive the more mundane.

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IDG Connect

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