LIAudioEvent_5_21

Advent Americas is hosting a LinkedIn audio event to discuss the future of autonomous mobile robots. The event is an open conversation between Advent staff, with guidelines to keep microphones muted. Advent supports various sectors, including energy management, automation, and medical applications. They have a corporate level industrial vertical team that works with supplier-manufacturer partners to promote solutions for industrial customers. They are also hosting a webinar on autonomous mobile robots in partnership with several companies. AMRs have various use cases, including warehouse robots, home vacuums, last mile delivery, agriculture, construction, security surveillance, and medical assistance. AMRs are differentiated by their mobility and level of autonomy compared to other types of robots. Engineers need to consider cost, size, weight, power, and reliability when designing AMRs. Security is also important for connected AMRs. The event concludes with a Q&A session. This person right here that's listening, that's me on my other computer. So we'll just wait a few minutes to allow people to join. All right, we'll give a few more minutes to allow everyone to join. Hello Kamal, I hope I'm saying your name correctly. I hope you're... Wait a few more minutes. I'm going to go ahead and start. Good morning everyone. My name is Lily Brown, Social Media Manager for Advent Americas. We are thrilled to welcome you to our second LinkedIn audio event today where we will delve into the future of autonomous mobile robots. But before we get started, I would like to establish a few guidelines just to ensure a seamless experience. This event is designed as an open conversation between Advent staff. To minimize distractions, we kindly request that you keep your microphones muted. We highly value your insights and questions, but to maintain the flow of our discussion, please save any questions until the designated Q&A session towards the end of this event. A brief Q&A segment will take place, and instructions on how to signal for questions will be provided in the comments section. So now that we have the housekeeping details out of the way, it's my pleasure to introduce Jamie Peterson, our esteemed technical content manager who will lead today's discussion. We hope you find this session informative and enjoyable. Let's get started. Thank you. As Jamie said, I'm the technical content manager here at Advent. I'm joined by Travis Dossett. He's the director of industrial sales here at Advent, and Neil Willard is our industrial technical manager. I want to thank you guys for joining me. And I thought maybe we'd start off, Travis, if you want to share Advent's commitment to the industrial vertical with everybody, that'd be great. Sure, Jamie, that'd be my pleasure. So at Advent, our broad customer base of OEMs, contract manufacturers, and more are directly supported by our staff of hundreds of salespeople and field application engineers. One of the major sectors that we support through our design and supply chain services is, of course, industrial, which includes everything from energy management applications, like EV charging and energy storage systems, to automation applications like HVAC, smart building, robotics, which we're here to talk about today, to medical applications and a lot more. While the day-to-day of our customer support is handled by our local offices close to our customer base, Advent is also invested in an industrial vertical team at the corporate level. Neil Willard on the presentation here with us and I are both a part of this team. We also have several sales executives as part of that team. Our job as the industrial vertical team is to work closely with our supplier-manufacturer partners to understand and promote the latest and greatest solutions that these suppliers have to offer that will enable our customers in the industrial market to create the most successful end products while minimizing obstacles to production. We work closely with our field sales and engineering staff to do that. One of the ways we do that is through informational activities like a public-facing webinar on autonomous mobile robots that we have coming up on June 11th and June 13th. For that webinar, we're partnering with Advantech, OnSemi, Renesas, Molex, Infineon, Micron, and Microchip to bring you seven webinars breaking down the various subsystems that can be found within autonomous mobile robots, helping you to overcome whatever design challenges you may encounter. That webinar will initially be live and will ultimately be available on demand for those that register, so please make sure you click the link in the comments to get to that registration site to get signed up. Jamie, I'm looking forward to this conversation with you and be able to dive a little bit deeper into the topic of autonomous mobile robots today. Thank you, Travis. I think that's very helpful. I appreciate the insight into everything Advantech is doing. Just looking at it, it looks like we seem to have lost Neal also. Just give him a second to jump back on here. I apologize to everybody. As we know, computers can be great, but every once in a while we have some technical difficulties. I can probably take some of Neal's first questions while he's getting reconnected. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I think I was going to start off with, as the audio event is about the future of autonomous mobile robots, when I think of AMRs, the first thing I always think of is the warehouse and factory type robots. What other business cases are there for AMRs? Sure. I think you're talking about the traditional use cases. We see certainly the warehouse robots that we're all familiar with. Of course, there's also consumer instances, like the home vacuums that we're all familiar with, the little disc-shaped home vacuums rolling around. Last mile delivery is something that's been a little bit of a hot topic lately, removing the need for a human delivery service to bring that package, that last mile. But there's a lot more new emerging use cases that we're seeing out there. There's a lot going on in the agricultural space. We're seeing a lot more agricultural autonomous mobile robots, as well as in the construction and security surveillance space, as well as medical assistance. Speaking of that webinar that we have in June, our supplier partner, Advantech, is going to provide an overview of the modern autonomous mobile robot market and some key terms within that space to really zero in on what we're talking about and what are some of the solutions we have in that space to support all of those use cases. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, that's interesting. Before we get too far, maybe we should dig into what an AMR is and how that differs from other robotic robots. How would you guys, as experts, define AMRs versus other types of robots? Travis, I can take this one, if you can hear me. So probably one of the biggest piece, right, so a robot, I think everybody's fairly familiar with what a robot is, right? Kind of an automated piece of equipment to do a specific task. With the AMR, some of the pieces that differentiate it, one would be the mobility, right? So it's not fixed to a specific location. It has some freedom of movement to move around its workspace, whether it be a factory floor, a house, a field, you know, something like that. And the other big differentiator is its level of autonomy, right? So it's able to sense its environment and make decisions on the fly without kind of human interventions, right? So that requires some additional awareness and perception and decision-making skills. Kind of one of the big differences between an autonomous mobile robot versus like an automatic guided vehicle is kind of the level of autonomy, right? A guided vehicle is following a pre-defined path and if something were to get in the way of that path, it's going to have to be stuck, right? Whereas an AMR is going to be able to navigate, potentially navigate around that and keep on going. So our supplier partners on Semi will work in the, talk about the different subsystems found in AMR architecture. And, you know, along with that, with autonomy, you know, kind of goes hand in hand with artificial intelligence and machine learning. And our supplier partners from Renesas will cover some of the key vision and AI enabling technologies to help accelerate your AMR design efforts. And then specifically kind of to the algorithm side and the number crunching to be able to do the machine learning and AI piece, Micron will cover the importance and impact of high-speed memory in ML applications. That's interesting. Thank you. So I assume cost is a consideration in these type of designs. How can engineers provide functionality and performance while balancing cost considerations? Yeah, so generally, you know, especially in these applications, you know, size, weight, power and cost, kind of the swap C factors are always in play there. You know, typically the AMRs are going to be battery powered. So reducing size and weight, you know, while increasing efficiency tends to extend the battery life. So allowing for more productivity, resulting in a lower cost of ownership. You know, smaller designs require less PCB area, typically maybe less heating. So less expensive thermal relief. You know, in general, an AMR hopefully is going to be doing, you know, the work of a human at a more cost-effective price. Our supplier partners from Infineon will cover some of the latest generation or new generation of products allowing for highly efficient, densely powered AMR designs. You know, kind of hand in hand with that for cost of ownership, you know, reliability increases uptime and availability, which would lower the cost of ownership. And our supplier partners at Molex will discuss the importance of reliable connectors and interconnects, you know, that can often be a failure point in AMR. So they're going to dive into that. Sure, sure. And does security also play a role in AMRs? Absolutely, right. So pretty much all these AMRs are going to be connected devices. You know, cybersecurity, that is always an issue. You don't want these things kind of being, you know, taken over by a bad actor. User authentication defines what people can do on a network and, you know, what the AMR will, you know, what it'll listen to, what it has access to. And so Microchip, our friends at Microchip will present on security authentication in AMRs there. Okay, perfect. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think that's the questions that I had prepared for today. Maybe if we want to open it up and see if we have any questions from the audience. So we will now open up the floor for questions. If anyone has a question, please raise your hand and I'll invite you to join on the stage. And if you hover over your picture, you'll see three dots, and that's where you can click the action to raise your hand. All right. If there's no questions, thank you, everyone. Thank you, Jamie, Travis, and Neil for your insightful information you shared. We hope that you found this session today informative and engaging, and we look forward to seeing all of you at our next event, which is the Industrial Tech Two-Day Webinars on June 11th and June 13th. If you go to our event page where this audio event was hosted, you'll see in the comments where you can register for this event. If you haven't already, thank you again. We hope you have a great day. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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