5 predictions for 2022—autonomous mobile robots will step out and drones will go everywhere

At the start of 2022, we bring you a series of episodes that pull together the five most interesting predictions we found in multiple areas in tech. Today we look at robotics, where vital technologies, such as simulation, are advancing and investments in others, such as tactile sensors, are set to increase. Most commentary suggests adoption will continue to be driven by industrial use cases, but robots will move well beyond factory floors. 1. A new wave of adoption of robotics will begin Multiple technologies have matured and are just starting to work together to make the adoption of robots easier in more industry verticals than ever before. “With the growing maturation of the collaborative robotics world, there's a logical inflexion point with end users that I'm beginning to see more frequently,” Brian Gerkey, co-founder and CEO of Open Robotics says, in a report by ZDNet. “Industries such as healthcare, e-commerce, logistics, manufacturing, and others are all adopting a second or third wave of robots,” and interoperability will be the next big challenge, he says. 2. Autonomous Mobile Robots will rise Autonomous mobile robots will go beyond factory floors—where they help move goods—into hospitals, services and ecommerce, says Shermine Gotfredsen, global sales director at ROEQ, in The Robot Report. “We also predict more AMRs not restricted to indoor movements, featuring more rugged, outdoor manoeuvrability,” she says. The market for autonomous mobile robots was worth just $1 billion in 2017 but is forecast to hit $7 billion in 2022, driven by increasing manufacturing automation, the growing ecommerce sector, mass personalisation of goods and a shortage of low-cost labour, according to Interact Analysis. 3. Drone delivery will take off “2022 will be the year robot delivery finally takes off,” professor Robin R. Murphy at Texas A&M University tells ZDNet. Analysis by Murphy’s team showed that during the first year of the pandemic, drones were used for medical applications in cities delivering samples and reagents from hospitals to laboratories faster than vehicles could drive across town, according to the ZDNet report. Drone deliveries will pick up around the world in 2022, going beyond medicines into deliveries of online purchases. 4. Robotics related tech will advance significantly Simulation is crucial to the design and development side of things and “a million times more robots will be built in the virtual world relative to the physical world,” Deepu Talla, VP & GM of embedded and edge computing, NVIDIA, tells The Robot Report. 2022 will see the coming together of simulation, the latest AI technologies, graphics and accurate high-performance physics modelling to accelerate robot development, Talla says. And Facebook, now called Meta, is investing in developing tactile sensors that could be driven by AI and find applications in robots. Meta AI has also partnered GelSight, a tactile imaging and sensing technology company, to commercially manufacture a sensor using tech that was designed and open-sourced by it in 2020. 5. Many more robotics startups In 2022, venture capital investments into robotics startups will increase, says Adam Rodnitzky, co-founder and COO of Tangram Vision, in The Robot Report. He also predicts that robotics startups will emerge without having any robotics specialists on the team. This will be due to the level of maturity and completeness of the tools available for creating a robotics company from scratch. Music courtesy: Free Music

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Every week day, Forbes India's Hari Arakali, Editor - Tech & Innovation, brings you his take on one piece of tech news that caught his attention, covering everything from big tech to India's growing tech startup ecosystem.