We believe technology can help power U.S. manufactures to be competitive throughout the world. We see robotics and AI as enabling and impactful agents to help accelerate productivity.

To help celebrate Massachusetts Manufacturing Month, we held a Robotics in Manufacturing event in collaboration with MassMEP and the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute. This was part of our Signature Robotics Event Series which brings together a focused industry that could benefit from robotics and AI technology solutions.

The purpose of this event was to highlight some of the challenges that our manufactures face, raise the awareness of some of the latest robotic enabling technologies that are available and, most importantly, encourage an exchange of ideas to help drive solutions.

Ira Moskowitz, CEO of the ARM Institute, helped kick off the event. Ira provided an overview of ARM’s mission and spoke about robotics trends in manufacturing, sharing his “top ten”:

Four Massachusetts manufacturers then provided information on their facilities. They shared challenges and offered potential solutions that could be solved by robotics. A common challenge with all – finding employees. All four manufacturers have many open positions and are actively looking for hires! Each shared views of their production lines and spoke about areas where robotics and AI could help improve processes and as well as with unfilled positions. Thanks to Vibram, Pelican, Davico and Cheerpack for their insightful presentations.

The second half of the event was kicked off by our partner Mitsubishi Electric. Hideaki Minamide, senior director at Mitsubishi Electric, shared thoughts on the future factory, compared traditional industrial robotics arms with collaborative arms and provided information on ASSISTA, a Mitsubishi Electric Collaborative Robot and discussed the ease of setup, control, programming and connecting. We have a few of the Mitsubishi arms in our Industrial Automation Lab!

Startups then presented their technology overviews, focusing on use cases and solutions that could potentially support manufacturing challenges. Startups included: FringeAI, Realbotics, Southie Autonomy, Ubiros, RasLabs, Scalable Robotics, Ascend Robotics, Ava Robotics, MachineMetrics, Tulip and Waypoint Robotics.

Here’s what our semi-virtual events look like! Tom Ryden, executive director of MassRobotics, moderating from the front of the event space, with a handful of on-site presenters and our operations team running the event from the back.

In-person attendees were treated to on-site demonstrations from Southie Autonomy, Ras Labs and FringeAI.

A recording of the event can be viewed here.