Robotic Systems Employed in Logistics

Industrial robotics has been a real industry since the 1960s, when the first programmable manipulators were deployed on the automotive assembly line. The industrial robot market was valued at $3 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow by at least 6% per year. While industrial robots are not as exciting as humanoid or quadrupedal robots that are starting to emerge from startup companies like Boston Dynamics and Agility, hundreds of thousands of them are at work each and every day in every country of the world, enabling the production and distribution of a wide spectrum of goods.

From assembling cars to sorting packages, industrial robots are adding tremendous value to many different companies across many industries. Because industrial robots are usually not fixed and very repeatable, they are sometimes thought of as not very flexible, but with the advent of modern machine vision and advanced algorithms, the number of non-repeatable tasks that industrial robots can do is starting to explode. Modern AI is starting to play a part in this explosion and this presentation will outline the past, present and future of AI advancements that are making industrial robots easier to apply and enabling their use in new industries.

About the presenter
David Bruce joined FANUC America Corporation (FAC) in 1997 and is currently an engineering manager in the General & Automotive Segment for a group of engineers that support FANUC Robot integrators and end users with iRVision and 3rd party machine vision-enabled applications. He has a Master of Science degree in computer science from Oakland University in Auburn Hills, MI and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario.