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Robots are coming to the factory and shop floors, but not all deployments go as planned. There are going to be technical mishaps, design challenges and other variables that emerge in practice regardless of how many tests were run, executives said.
“It’s always a little bit sad to plan for failure, but realistically … autonomy, hardware reliability, those are going to take a long time to get to even 99.9% reliable,” Oliver Ortlieb, co-founder and chief technology officer of Ultra Robotics, said during a panel discussion at New York Tech Week on June 4. He and other executives shared anecdotes with tech entrepreneurs and enthusiasts about bringing their robots from prototype to deployment.
“My view is that getting these systems to work for customers involves building systems that let you recover gracefully when there are failures,” Ortlieb said.
One time, he recalled, Ultra Robotics was working with a customer to build a sorting robot that picks up boxes and moves them to another location. The Brooklyn-based startup spent a couple weeks testing the system and “everything was perfect.” However, after the robot was installed at the customer’s site, it reached for the first package and the suction gripper “ripped the shipping label clean off,” Ortlieb said.
