What do you do if you want to revolutionize your industry with robotics?

To revolutionise your sector with robotics, analyse repetitive and dangerous jobs, investigate existing solutions, design your unique value proposition, construct a prototype, pilot and improve, build a team, acquire finance, and focus on user adoption and training. Examine your industry's processes, find solutions, and investigate robotics. Focus on how robotics can improve productivity, precision, or safety and your solution's unique benefits. Before implementation, test core functions and enhance design with a prototype. Gather robotics, engineering, and industry-specific experts and raise funds from grants, venture capitalists, or angel investors. Increase user adoption and training to ensure workflow integration.

Find a problem to solve - if you don’t know from your own experience, meet with people working in the industry and discuss their biggest problems, then try to understand if robotics are the right solution - sometimes they’re not.

Start by assessing your industry's needs and identifying areas where robotics can make a significant impact. This might involve conducting market research, analyzing current processes, and identifying pain points that can be addressed with robotics technology. For example, in the manufacturing industry, robotics can help automate repetitive tasks, improve efficiency, and enhance safety.

When choosing a problem to solve with robots, consider the environment the robot is expected to operate into. If you plan to use the robot in an unstructured environment, like a household, it might be too challenging as of today to navigate into. Try to put some degree of structure to those environments such that things are not perfectly scripted, like in industrial robotics, but also not completely unpredictable. Robots do well in tasks unpleasant to do or that they need to be done round-the-clock that don't require a human figure, the topic of acceptance of a robot among people is indeed in its infancy, in industry, and it might not be trivial to address

A proper workflow analysis is key to a successful automation project. You can’t automate something you don’t fully understand. Robots are great at performing dirty, dull and dangerous tasks so those are great target areas. In most cases, you will need to demonstrate a reasonable ROI for the investment in robotics as well as the cost of change.

A robot doing a single task is great, but to get the maximum effect you need to integrate that across your operations. For example, Robots generate valuable data that can help improve efficiency, if collected and analysed the right way.

Once you've identified the areas where robotics can be beneficial, it's important to develop a plan for integrating robotics into your existing processes. This includes determining the types of robotics technology that best suit your needs, establishing a timeline for implementation, and identifying any potential challenges or obstacles that may arise.

The next step is to design the robotics solutions that will meet your industry's specific needs. This involves working closely with robotics engineers and designers to develop robots that are tailored to your requirements. For example, in the healthcare industry, robotics can be used to assist with surgery, rehabilitation, and patient care.

For the success of your robots, it is key to characterise the task as clearly as you can. What the robot will need to do has an impact on every aspect of its hardware and software design and will dictate key decisions like which end effector the robot needs and which kinematics or arm is best and which sensors you can install and use. Getting the robot to be fully autonomous 100% of the time is the target but you can't get there from day one for every case. Either limit the range of activities that your robot should do or introduce piloting teams in the interim to help when the robot struggles. If you need machine learning, think from inception how you can collect large volumes of data with the robot hardware.

Once your robotics solutions have been designed, it's time to implement them into your operations. This may involve installing robots on the factory floor, integrating them into your existing IT systems, and training your employees to work alongside the new technology. It's important to carefully manage the implementation process to minimize disruptions to your business.

When you roll out at scale, ensure your developing teams can catch-up with your plan otherwise you could fail painfully. If your teams can't deliver as quickly as you need them to, invest into making them leaner and faster before rolling out. Invest in building metrics and service level agreements from day 1 so you clearly know what is going on and whether teams are delivering fast enough. Ensure you have a site you can use for field trials even beyond rolling at scale, so you can derisk and test new changes without impacting the customer. If you require to interact with humans, start with a selected few enthusiastic and establish a plan for acceptance beyond them. You want to fail fast and quickly, make sure you have that possibility

After implementing robotics technology, it's crucial to monitor its progress and effectiveness. This involves collecting data on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as productivity, efficiency, and cost savings. By closely monitoring progress, you can identify any issues that arise and make adjustments to improve performance.

There is an old saying about “failing fast and often”. Don’t be afraid to try new ideas. If they aren’t successful, learn for the failure and move on but don’t spend too much time trying to force success. This concept can be a challenging in corporate America where so many people think you have to succeed at every project to be a success.

To stay ahead in the rapidly evolving field of robotics, it's important to innovate continuously. This involves keeping up with the latest advancements in robotics technology, exploring new applications for robotics in your industry, and continuously improving your robotics solutions based on feedback and data.

Revolutionizing your industry with robotics requires careful planning, implementation, and continuous innovation. By following these steps and considering these factors, you can successfully integrate robotics technology into your operations and stay ahead of the competition.