The term robotics conquers up images of armies of humanoid machines, intent on taking over the world. Movies like Terminator, I Robot, and Star Wars suggest that robots are all about hardware. Certainly, modern robotics includes plenty of hardware applications, including home cleaning bots and the supremely orchestrated robotic tools along automotive assembly lines. But underneath the hardware lies sophisticated software.
Most recently, robotics has spilled over from machine-held applications to a great number of software-only or “bot” applications. We will favor the latter in this story, but will also cover the hardware side, too.
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What is Robotics?
Robotics is often referred to in the IT industry as either hyper-automation or intelligent automation. Each of these combine the power of robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), business process management (BPM), and other complementary technologies, to deliver a digital workforce.
“Robotics primarily augments an organization’s resources by taking away the mundane tasks human workers are overloaded with, empowering them to focus on the profit-driving initiatives only people can do,” said Joe Collura, VP of Solutions Engineering, Americas, for SS&C Blue Prism. “End-to-end processes can be re-imagined in order to best serve customers, employees, and key business objectives.”
What is a Software Robot?
Just as a physical robot in a factory is geared for industrial automation and other applications, a software robot is the equivalent for a knowledge worker.
Bots can be implemented anywhere that staff is clicking around and working on a computer all day. They are used to improve efficiency, take care of manually intensive tasks, and save knowledge workers time so they can focus their energies where it counts.
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Robotics Applications: Pioneers
SS&C Blue Prism was an early entrant into the highly regulated financial sector in the early 2000s, providing secure, scalable automation for areas such as compliance and finance. Financial institutions, too, have been increasingly been deploying intelligent automation. Other pioneering markets in robotics have generally been in the physical space and industrial automation warehouses.
“The last big breakthrough in software robotics was through a company called UiPath,” said Erol Toker, Founder and CEO of software robotics platform Truly. “They gave people the ability to build a robot that worked like a macro on a desktop computer. You could get it to record tasks that a lot of people do in the back office and automate a lot of those jobs away.”
That kind of basic automation, he said, doesn’t require a lot of intelligence and doesn’t use the full capabilities of AI and robotics. Take an insurance example: people submit their bills in the form of fax or email, somebody takes that communication, and inputs it from one system into another, or maybe an image comes into one system that needs to be scanned or translated over.
Although not a pioneer, healthcare is now among one of the strongest adopting sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic propelled that industry to achieve more in months than they had in the previous few years. Hospitals reorganized resources and building layouts, moved consultations online and, in some cases, adapted non-medical facilities to deliver care to those who needed it.
“The pandemic encouraged healthcare to accelerate their use of automation, with a majority using it to replace paper documents …….