Connectivity is essential to IIoT and scaling robotics in daily life, says Cisco. Source: Adobe Stock
This decade is shaping to be an important one for industrial robotics. While the integration of robots into everyday life has often been idealized in a distinctly far-away future, we are now witnessing a convergence of high expectations with real-world experiences, all dependent on connectivity.
Robotics technology is demonstrating its capability to support a range of public-facing and behind-the-scenes services, and importantly, it is doing so with increasing frequency.
We’ve reached a point where once intractable challenges in the industrial space are being increasingly solved with robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence. Consider these three examples where industrial robotics is playing an increased role in our lives.
Robotaxis, e-grocery, and hospitals normalize tech
In just a few short years, robotaxis have transitioned from being a novelty to being accepted as a safe mode of travel. They have become a common way to travel in San Francisco and Phoenix, to the point where the exact number of robotaxis from companies like Waymo operating on city streets is unknown.
Considering the technical challenge of designing and operating a fleet of robotaxis, there’s perhaps no better indication that the most difficult parts of this challenge have been resolved than by the shift in customer conversation about the taxis. Nowadays, the lack of a human driver is less of a concern than the cleanliness of the ride.
Robots are also highly integrated into grocery and e-commerce operations. Across Amazon’s entire operations, for example, there were 750,000 industrial robots in use at last count, up from 200,000 in 2020. Again, this growth rate demonstrates the shortened time-to-acceptance for industrial robotics.
We’ve now moved beyond questions of whether fulfillment technology is capable to how quickly a robot-assisted order can arrive at the buyer’s place of residence. Incidentally, the endpoint is now inviting the use of other forms of robotics such as drone delivery to quicken the pace even further.
Meanwhile, in hospitals, complex surgical tasks have been robot-assisted for years. This is now evolving to telesurgery, which combines robotics with communications systems to perform surgery from remote locations.
Pre-clinical trials have shown it is possible to perform procedures with surgeons sitting thousands of miles from the operating theater. This could be the next use of industrial robotics to go mainstream and become an accepted part of life.
Surgeons from National University Hospital and Fujita Health University demonstrate how a console unit in Singapore controls four robotic arms in Nagoya, Japan. Credit: National University Health System
Connectivity is all-important for robotics
It’s clear that commercial robotics has reached a point where it’s capable of solving a wide variety of use cases, and of meeting business and consumer expectations. But the surgical example in particular makes an important point: These advances are not driven by robotics alone.
Communications networks have a crucial role to play in ensuring that robots — whether self-driving vehicles, drones, industrial or cobot arms, or humanoids — can do a task consistently, reliably, and to a high enough quality standard that they are accepted. In a high-stakes world augmented or run by robotics, low-latency and ultra-reliable connectivity can be the difference between success and failure.
A sudden drop in connectivity could force a robot to stop halfway through its task. Not all impacts are going to be equal — the loss of connectivity is less critical for drone delivery than for robot-assisted surgery.
Ongoing acceptance of and the social license to operate robots is contingent on consistent, reliable performance. This also depends on a certain type of communications network. The industrial Internet of Things or IIoT is a significant underlying driver and enabler.
An important “North Star” characteristic for these networks is that they are lossless. All critical data is transmitted to and from the industrial robot so it can function optimally all of the time, without failure.
Quality of connectivity service ties devices together
Hardware — routers, switches, fiber optic cabling, cellular base stations, and wireless access points — is part of reliable connectivity. The other part is service assurance. Data traffic today is largely transmitted over the Internet, which itself includes a complex mix of connectivity services that are either owned by the robotics user such as the robotaxi company or hospital, or by another telecommunications provider.
It’s important to have the capability to bring all those components and connections together and to make that communication lossless from one end to the other. Every part must work seamlessly and in synchronization to enable a robot to perform its intended tasks effectively. The integrity of the network connected to the robot has to be maintained, guaranteed, and assured at all times.
Today’s uses of robotics already demonstrate its widening applicability and potential. The question now is what can robotics achieve next? Key to unlocking more use cases will be trust in performance and in connectivity.
Both businesses and consumers need to trust that sensors, robots, and AI can complete the tasks at hand without disruption. To that end, IIoT and network assurance services play an integral part. The future is here, and so is the technology to make it a reality.
About the author
Mike Hicks is principal solutions analyst at Cisco ThousandEyes. In his more than 30 years of industry experience, Hicks has supported large, complex networks and worked closely with infrastructure vendors on application profiling and management.
He is the author of Managing Distributed Applications: Troubleshooting in a Heterogeneous Environment (Prentice Hall 2000) and Optimising Applications on Cisco Networks (Cisco Press 2004).
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