Robots Relieve Manpower Thanks to robots, people are relieved of the so-called 4D tasks (dull, dirty, danger- ous, delicate). As a result, one often hears that robots are taking away jobs. "But is this really true? It may be true that at pres- ent – compared to the 50s and 60s – re- petitive work processes that are danger- ous to humans, for example in assembly, are virtually non-existent. But even today, after decades of increasing use of robots in manufacturing, skilled workers are still desperately sought after. We do not see an eradication, but rather a transformation of jobs in terms of quality. One of the great challenges in this working world is the further education and training of existing and upcoming generations. So what does the balance look like? Loss of monotonous, dangerous, boring work and profit in more demanding, creative activities," concludes Volker Spanier. RFID and Sensor Technology for Optimal Control Both sensors and RFID play a major role in applications and robot systems. "In ad- dition to our force sensor, which by defi- nition is equipped with appropriate trans- ducers, all of our robots have an element that measures acceleration in their arms. For example, if a heavily loaded arm starts to vibrate, the sensor – an Epson propri- etary development called MEMS – detects this disturbance and initiates an adjust- ment of the motor currents by the con- troller. As a result, users with Epson robots obtain exceptionally precise and control- lable trajectories, which further simplifies the planning of a robotic cell. RFID plays an important role in many demanding au- tomation projects. Recently, a project was completed in which one of our robots ap- plied an RFID chip woven into a fabric tape to a shipment. Applications of this kind are steadily increasing," says Volker Spanier. Artificial Intelligence for Future Robot Control? "First of all, a distinction must be made between commercial and academic robot applications. If new, self-configuring algo- rithms (e.g. AlphaZero) show astonishing performance, especially in the research en- vironment, this means that there is still no machine or system for a concrete task," ex- plains Volker Spanier. On the other hand, networked production plants and locations are becoming more important, also for adapting processes to changing conditions at short notice. With these developments, such as extensive digitization and network- ing, and the associated topics of Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things, production sites have the opportunity to implement struc- tures down to the component level effi- ciently and flexibly. This is made possible by systems that process a volume of data in real time in a way that was previously un- thinkable. However, modern algorithms and technologies of Big Data Analysis or Ma- chine Learning are available for the evalua- tion of this information. 54 RFID & WIRELESS IOT GLOBAL • Special Edition 2020