The robotics industry is experiencing a golden age. Driven by increasing diversification, the global robotics sector is rapidly growing, with a total value of more than $ 100 billion. The robotics segment for professional services will dominate, with more than double industrial and logistics robots sales.
Outside of the productive environment, robotics plays a crucial role in addressing key social issues or "mega-trends" in some areas: demographic change, resilience, health and wellbeing, food production, transportation, and safety. Robots already serve as life-saving tools for surgery, competent rehabilitation coaches, attentive guards and rescuers to protect the environment and human lives, and reliable vehicles in all kinds of logistics. Therefore, their role, influence, and interaction with people will only intensify.
The creation of robots is a thorough and high-tech process. It is necessary to line up an algorithm for the manipulator's work, calculate the loading processes along several axes and ensure long-term trouble-free operation. It is possible only via using materials and components of the highest quality and specified mechanical, chemical, and technological properties.
The future robot's appearance is influenced not only by production and economic factors. Their attire and functionality will also be determined by the environmental component, the degree of interaction between robots and people, the need for robots' socialization, and the development of related industries. Thus, high-speed Internet will enhance self-organization and expand the optionality of robotic technology. And the COVID-19 pandemic has created significant conditions for the global automation of online trading platforms and the creation of logistic robots that can pack, deliver and even heat food.
In the recent past, experts have seriously discussed the possibility of simulating the success of a personal computer in order to create a unique robot that would help people in their daily life. Even though these companion robots or assistants offer the prospect of reaching the mass market, it is considered that the essential technological advancement, attractive product designs, and low-cost manufacturing prolong this idea with an unrealizable maturity in the nearest future. However, large-scale research and manufacturing efforts have been planned or ongoing to create these most potent machines.
Robotics, remaining an essentially investment-intensive strategy for optimizing business processes, achieves payback in the medium and long term due to systematic cost reduction, acceleration of the production cycle, and a qualitative improvement in the final result (the latter is mainly due to the exclusion of the human error factor). The automation of the production process can pay off within an interval of one to three years (it depends on the products' volume and the wages of the personnel replaced by robots).
Today the most promising areas of robotics in business are industry, agriculture, logistics, medicine. The adaptation of universal technologies (industrial manipulators, drones) for a specific niche application is of great importance. That is where, now, the vastest opportunities open up for system integrators that are ready, in response to their customers' requests, to offer highly specialized effective robotic systems for their tasks based on tirelessly improving platforms of a broad profile from leading manufacturers.