Robots as Asset-as-a-Service: A rental model for industry

Wandelbots equips robots with intrinsic intelligence to predict a human’s likely next moves. It should then react accordingly and continue its work at another point, for example. The robot needs so-called skills (work orders) for this. They stand for certain motion sequences with which the robot performs its tasks. They are sent to it as a data packet. It is also equipped with Infineon sensors that measure position and performance data. The position of the robot is determined with sensor fusion, a combination of localization systems radar and 3D cameras(TOF). An adaptive AI solution in the edge evaluates this data and can thus improve collaboration between humans and machines. This makes the robot much more flexible and allows variable deployment scenarios, so it can be used in a rental model. The data collected by the sensors is then transferred via the Industrial IoT to the SAP cloud (SAP Business Technology Platform), where it is analyzed by another adaptive application. Its main task is predictive maintenance, i.e. predictive maintenance based on changes in performance data. This enables the solution to detect the degree of wear of tools on the robot’s head at an early stage, for example. The performance data builds a bridge between the purely producing system (in this case the robot) and the actual order data from Order Management. This is especially important for the billing of rental equipment. Here, it is important to precisely invoice the individual orders, for example, according to the number of pieces produced or per unit of time. In addition, documentation is automatically created for the client, who can thus better evaluate the billing of the rented systems.