Among the top five robotics use cases in 2020, IDC estimated a strong need for robotic automation in the areas of assembly, pick and place, painting, welding and other tasks. To be able to bring robotic automation into these industrial applications, experienced programmers and trained experts use their special domain knowledge to set up the whole system for their clients, including the choice of robot hardware, software and on-site installation.
Besides that this is an immense effort in terms of resources and costs for each new client and application, any update -- such as a change of the environment, the task or a simple piece of logic -- needs another involvement of the integrator to modify the system. Making the programming of robots much easier is thus a necessary requirement for a more rapid adaptation of robotic automation, especially for smaller industries without the resources to employ integrators. A way to achieve this is through automated or semi-automated solutions that can be implemented without deep expertise in programming or robotics.
There are many components involved in making robots smarter and easier to maintain (such as machine vision tools, robot navigation software, or language processing systems to give only a few examples). However, especially in the sectors of factory automation, industry 4.0 and the processing industry, a fundamental skill is grasping. The common process to make a robot interact with an object is for the programmer to pre-program a single repetitive task, such as fixing a door to a car, with expert programming skills. To make the robot do a different task, however, such as inspecting hundreds of different surgical instrument types, the same programmer would spend at least the same effort to program each single object, and potentially have to exchange a number of components in the whole system.
There is thus a demand for a flexible solution like VirtualGrasp that allows grasping of any object with any gripper in any application, and to further democratize programming of robotic systems to enable more people to use and deploy robots for their applications.
