In this episode, we take a glimpse back into the history of robotics, as ABB Robotics celebrates 50 years of robotics this year. Ali Raja, ABB Robotics’ Managing Director – Industries US, joins TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll and Winn Hardin to share some company’s history of innovation, which started with the first microprocessor robot in 1974. They reflect on the growth of the robotics industry in this time, as well as the growing acceptance of robotics in the workplace and their impact on the labor market. They also discuss ABB’s recent acquisition of Sevensense, artificial intelligence in the industrial space, emerging markets for robotics, and much more.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:08] Hi everybody. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing, and we’re here on the Manufacturing Matters podcast. I have the pleasure of being joined by Ali Raja from ABB and of course my colleague Winn Hardin. Ali, thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate it. Ali’s from ABB. So most people know ABB, but if you could give us maybe a little insight into what’s new and exciting at ABB and what you do there, that would be helpful.

Ali Raja: [00:00:35] Thank you Jimmy. So I’m Ali Raja. I am leading the industries business for ABB Robotics. This is a very exciting year for us because we’re also celebrating the 50 years of robotics industry. So in 1974, there was a company in Sweden that launched the world’s first microprocessor-powered robot. And now that company, at the time called ASEA, they are part of our group. And they put the A in ABB. So we are very excited to be here and celebrate 50 years of robotics, which has been really a fascinating journey for all the companies in the space. And yeah, so this is one of the things that we want to celebrate together.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:23] Absolutely. Are there any special events at ABB Robotics this year?

Ali Raja: [00:01:26] Yes, indeed. There is an event later this summer in Sweden. And yeah, it’s not just for us to celebrate 50 years of ABB Robotics, but as the industry coming together as a whole. So yes, there are some, and we see that we’re also celebrating 50 years of A3 as an association here. It’s coincidental. It all started together. Yeah. We are all in the robotics field.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:54] That makes sense considering the breadth of your your robotic portfolio, which is, I believe, comprehensive and complete from deltas, SCARAs, and cobots.

Ali Raja: [00:02:03] This is actually one of the things that we feel very proud and honored, because we’ve had a history of innovation when it comes to robotics. The first microprocessor robot in 1974, and then ABB was the first company to introduce a delta robot to the market. The first collaborative robot, which is YuMi, came in 2005. And now we are also the first robotics company to integrate a full portfolio of AMR, or mobile robots, within our portfolio. Even within the AMR space, there’s a lot of innovation. For example, the visual navigation which we’ve just introduced is unique to ABB. And this came through an acquisition of a company that we were working with in Switzerland. But we’ve now just integrated them within our team. So yeah, it’s been really a lot of focus on innovation, pioneering new technology, and really delighted to see how that has been adopted, because when we think about what is our purpose or mission, it’s to really elevate work for a better society, and this is the role that robots are playing.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:03:24] Elevate work and not take people’s jobs, which is kind of something that’s gone a little bit — it’s kind of a tired storyline. Maybe six or seven years ago that was one of the headlines, right? The robots are going to take people’s jobs, and people are starting to finally realize, well, maybe that’s not the case.

Ali Raja: [00:03:39] Yeah. I mean, we see a lot of data. And even yesterday we were at this presentation where they talked about millions of jobs are still unfilled. And even with all the immigration, there’s no way to fill those jobs.

Winn Hardin: [00:03:51] Right, over 8 million.

Ali Raja: [00:03:53] And we’ve seen that companies that are automating, especially using robotics, they tend to have more vacancies and more positions available because their teams are growing. So it’s upscaling jobs and creating new types of roles.

Winn Hardin: [00:04:09] And opening up career paths beyond just assemblers, line-level folks. They can manage work cells.

Ali Raja: [00:04:17] It’s a huge need. I can give you just one example for U.S. because we are here sitting in the U.S. there’s a shortage of 400,000 welders. There’s the backlog for welding is many tens of millions of hours. There is no way to fill that other than automation.

Winn Hardin: [00:04:35] Yeah, and overtime is incredibly expensive. And you’ve got to take your labor multiple and at least throw a 1.5.

Ali Raja: [00:04:40] It’s very bad for health if you do overtime welding 20 hours a day.

Winn Hardin: [00:04:44] Yeah that would be bad for my health. Sevensense was the company you acquired when you brought VSLAM in. That was a relatively recent occurrence?

Ali Raja: [00:04:55] Yes, this is only a couple of weeks ago. It’s a very recent announcement, but of course we’ve been working very closely with Sevensense for the last two years. And now with all the progress we’ve made on the integration of our portfolios, it just made sense to work together as one team. Okay. So Sevensense is now 100% part of ABB Robotics.

Winn Hardin: [00:05:18] So can you tell us a little bit about what it means to combine basically machine vision or visual acuity along with other lidar and other sensing mechanisms that you might be using in your AMR system? what what makes VSLAM different from what’s out there in the market?

Ali Raja: [00:05:32] So obviously you can see a few videos online, and that explains it in a bit more detail. What makes it different is more flexibility, because we’re using a different kind of sensor for localization and mapping. So it’s not just a 2D or a 3D laser, which looks at some of the aspects around. It’s much more in-depth information that you can capture from cameras. And there are multiple cameras on a vehicle, and that allows you to do almost differentiation between what are fixed things, like a door or a pillar, versus a trash can or a person. And then using AI, you’re able to make decisions like, I’m not going to count this thing in the map because this is going to move from here. And this kind of intelligent decision-making is what sets it apart from just a laser, which is looking at everything and says, Oh, okay, I see an object. This is part of my environment.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:06:39] Ali, you mentioned AI, and I wanted to ask about that both in the context of Sevensense, which you kind of touched on, but in general, AI and as of late large language models, generative AI in particular, has been kind of a hot topic, for better or worse. But what’s ABB’s approach or stance on that? Is there a place for generative AI in the industrial space?

Ali Raja: [00:07:02] I’m really glad you asked this because this is indeed a really hot topic. It’s also one of our key focuses. If when we think about how can we bring more value to the robotic integrators, the automation companies in this space, it’s through taking the robot, the base, the arm, and then adding some more intelligence, like AI-enabled machine vision or AI-enabled skills, which are specifically trained to do, for example, parcel handling. It’s an area with a lot of need of automation because the total parcel volume is growing across the world, and it’s a very manual activity. Also, if you look at order picking or bin picking, these were applications that were very stagnant for a long time because when you have a lot of variety of different packages, different sizes, shapes, some things are very reflective, shiny, and AI is now unlocking some of these barriers or new applications because we have now the ability to train the robots, they self-learn and get more accurate at first-time picks. So we’re now integrating these technologies within our robot modules. And then we deliver this module to other integrators. And that makes their life easy when it comes to integration and developing a complete solution, so not every company has to spend years to reinvent all the software and the AI behind some of these mainstream applications.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:42] So I’m curious, when you deploy AI, especially in the AMR context, and you’re in a particular facility, and you mentioned that it’s a learning model, right, so the model is evolving and growing more powerful over time. Does that knowledge gets shared across the AMR network or is it localized?

Ali Raja: [00:09:00] It’s shared across the robots. And it’s not specific only to AMRs. Even when you look at industrial robots or cobots, when you have an integrated AI model, then any learning that you take from one bin picker or order-picking robot, you can share it across the entire fleet. It can be on the same side or different sides in different locations. Even countries. It depends on how far the users want to expand that knowledge.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:09:30] I want to ask about the AMRs. I don’t want to focus just there, but I do have a question that’s kind of interesting from my perspective is what kind of access do you give your customers when it comes to data for fleet management? Like how can they look at their data to improve operational efficiencies? Do you have software tools for that?

Ali Raja: [00:09:47] Yes, we do have some tools. We have now a single platform tool. We call it the AMR Studio. You’ve probably heard of RobotStudio. So it’s a similar concept, which is the platform that you can use to control all the different types of vehicles in our portfolio. And then there are specific tools for making layouts and designs and performance optimization tools that are all kind of embedded within the different layers. The idea was to have one simple platform that when the users are training their engineers, their operators, they don’t have to work with five different softwares and learn all of the different technologies from what used to be traditionally from different suppliers. So one company was doing this one piece, and then there’s another company that do the traffic management layer, and the third one that can have a look and do the optimization of the entire solution. So we do all of that now in one platform. Plus there is a specific tool, which is the OptiFact, and that allows you to look at all the different components, equipment, and things in your fleet and then optimize the performance of the entire set.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:03] Do new customers go through their training programs or do they use RobotStudio and AMR Studio as part of the training, or do you have different sims for that?

Ali Raja: [00:11:11] So we have training modules for our customers who want to train their workforce on how to install, commission, and then operate and maintain these solutions.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:24] And you do have AI in both sides, both RobotStudio and AMR Studio at this point?

Ali Raja: [00:11:29] AI, I wouldn’t say that it goes across all of these modules. It is application specific. So, for example, if you look at AMRs, the slam navigation or the visual slam navigation is AI enabled, but not all the other kinds of navigation that we have in our portfolio. Similarly, when you look at the traditional industrial robot portfolio, there are certain applications, like parcel singulation or depalletizing or item picking. These are AI enabled, and we are bringing these as modules to the market so that the integrators can take these, and then they can work a solution or a cell around it.

Winn Hardin: [00:12:18] Well that would have to be because you need the pretrained models to be able to be a foundation alone, right?

Ali Raja: [00:12:22] The needs of the pretrained models is what we’ve been working on for the last few years.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:12:29] Ali, one of the things that’s kind of been an ongoing trend and perhaps it’s a little bit obvious, but a thread that we’ve heard a lot is ease of use. And you’ve kind of touched on it a little bit here, making things easier for people, but in addition to things like the labor shortage, which have been persisting and won’t go away, like you were saying earlier, there’s just certain jobs I think the younger generations don’t want to do. But ease of use to me is something that is helping to drive automation adoption. Has that been your perception of it as well? And what are some ways that ABB tries to make their technology easier to the end user?

Ali Raja: [00:13:05] Ease of use is another key area. So not every company who are now entering this robotics space have trained robot engineers. So we believe that a robot needs to become as easy as adopting any other normal appliance that we buy today, and we can just take it out of the box and after five minutes, we know how it works. So this is the goal. In the last few years, we’ve taken some concrete steps in this direction. So if you remember when we launched the new collaborative robot, the GoFa. It came with easy programming using Blockly. So that was a way to really make it easier for somebody who does not know how to do coding to learn how to program a robot. And then as a next step, we introduced the lead-through programming, which has a little click-through device. And you just hold the robot and you guide it on a path, and you click on different positions that you want to record. And then you can play it, and it just does that thing over and over again. And now the next step, even more exciting, is ideas around voice guided. So you just tell the robot what to do. And this is an exciting new area. Let’s see what is coming in this space.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:32] That’d be interesting. So you can’t even translate what I say to my phone.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:14:35] I can vouch for that.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:36] Effectively beyond 80%. I always like to make it a mystery when I’m trying to say.

Ali Raja: [00:14:43] It needs to be like that. You need to be able to give commands like you do to a person and then they can execute. So this is a new exciting area where we will see a lot of innovation from ABB and also other companies.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:56] Are you offering that now? Is that part of your AMR Studio now or is that future stuff?

Ali Raja: [00:15:01] It is future stuff.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:04] It’s very exciting.

Ali Raja: [00:15:05] Super exciting.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:07] Ali, one of the things that I really like to ask is, you know we go to shows and we hear from the like, oh, we get high-level, 50,000-foot economy overviews. But folks like you, especially in ABB Robotics, you’re across pretty much all major verticals that robotics is playing into. What markets excite you today?

Ali Raja: [00:15:25] I think some of the most exciting areas for us is where robotics is new and is enabling new applications. When we think about where we’re coming from, the past is the robots inside factories. Automotive, manufacturing and welding, cutting sectors, which is still a growing area. But in the future we say robots are outside the factory, unleashed, and there the most exciting spaces are health care and life sciences. It’s an area which is almost entirely manual. When you look at lab automation, as the genetic medicine grows, the need for DNA analysis, sampling, and even producing DNA is going to grow exponentially. And that’s one area where robots play really a key role. Because these processes have to be run 24/7. You cannot stop and start. And it’s very relevant for automation. Logistics, driven by e-commerce but also driven by consumer behavior. That’s an area where automation and robotics now play a really key role. Construction is an exciting one. Agriculture will also become quite relevant as the population grows.

Winn Hardin: [00:16:51] That’s the market that excites me a lot.

Ali Raja: [00:16:53] We are very excited about these new areas and some of the new technologies, this ease of use that you talked about. We talked about AI. All these are enablers for robots being able to do some of these things that frankly, a few years ago, was not possible or not feasible commercially.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:17:15] It’s interesting. There’s a lot of different components that go into a lot of these, like warehouse automation, for example. There’s a lot of different types of automation activities in the warehouse. And you get to see all of these different technologies advancing together to solve new problems. And that’s not just the robot. I mean, it’s definitely the robot, but it’s from the software side. It’s on the vision side, motion control, lighting. And it’s just very fascinating to watch things kind of grow together, even on the industrial computing side. More powerful processors, more powerful GPUs to make things happen faster, more reliably. It’s cool to come here and talk to people like you to see how you’re leveraging these technologies and what that means to you. So, on that note, in the general automation space, industrial automation, do you have any trends, observations, or predictions that you see in the next couple of years as being the next big thing, or maybe something will be the opposite of the next big thing? Anything like this?

Ali Raja: [00:18:11] No crystal ball to be honest. In my view, I think we’ll see more cloud computing. So my background is in warehouse automation, and I remember that whenever we used to design an automated warehouse solution, you pretty much always needed a room with all the servers and the hardware. And that room needed to be fireproof. And then you needed to copy that room in another building in case this one runs down. Now most of these cases you can do all the computing in the cloud. So that’s one trend that will continue. I think we will see the growth of AMR and more flexible ways of transporting materials and not so much conveyors anymore.

Ali Raja: [00:18:58] We will see mobile manipulators. So a lot of companies are experimenting with a robot arm on a mobile platform, with some success in certain specific cases. I think this will grow. And there’s many companies working on unlocking, for example, container unloading and loading completely autonomously. As we see more progress in this area, I think this will be a challenge that will be solved in the next two, three years, and that will be a huge enabler for many other applications.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:19:33] Ali, I want to ask one thing that you mentioned in there is the rise or the increased importance, let’s say, of cloud computing. Are you finding that certain customers are less scared to put their data in the cloud now?

Winn Hardin: [00:19:48] Or is it hybrid edge deployments?

Ali Raja: [00:19:51] It’s changing. There have been concerns, and different companies have different views on this. But we found that the benefits far outweigh the risks in some cases. Even with sharing data on products. For example, when we talk about training these AI models on millions of different products. In the beginning, companies were quite protective of their data. No these are my products. I don’t want to share it with my competitor. And now when they see that, well if you share then they will also share. And then your model is a lot stronger and works better. Then they’re becoming more open. Everybody wins.

Winn Hardin: [00:20:39] Do you think the new generations, Generation Z, Alpha behind them, and their immersion in the digital universe, do you think that will also change, including the growth of social sharing and other things? Do you think that will help also further change that? It just seems like there’s more willingness to trust the system. Whether we’ve tackled all the cybersecurity issues or not.

Ali Raja: [00:21:03] Maybe not just blindly trust, but also the advancement of progress in cybersecurity, that also allows companies to feel a little bit safer. If they know that there’s a way to protect their data and set some boundaries, then this is making it easier to make some progress from an innovation perspective.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:21:28] Ali, what else haven’t we asked about that you are excited about at ABB or in the space in general?

Ali Raja: [00:21:34] I think we covered all the major topics. Like I said, I’m excited about the robotics side.

Winn Hardin: [00:21:38] ABB goes far beyond that.

Ali Raja: [00:21:46] I know more about robots than some of the other parts of our business. As a group, I would say we’re very excited about some of the technologies in the EV charging space and infrastructure, sustainable technologies and products that we’re bringing. I feel proud to be a part of a group who are working to keep the planet cleaner and greener.

Winn Hardin: [00:22:13] We need help in that area, so that’s important indeed.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:22:17] Indeed. Well, Ali, thank you so much for taking the time today. We really appreciate it. Obviously people can go learn more on LinkedIn or ABB.com. Again, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Ali Raja: [00:22:27] Thank you for having me. It’s been really a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:22:31] Of course. And if anyone has any questions, comments, wants to reach out, wants to join the podcast: manufacturing-matters.com. Thanks.