Blue Ocean Robotics: Developing Thinking Machines for Productivity and Quality-of-Life

In recent times, robotics technology is widely recognized for delivering efficiency, reliability, low spoilage, and higher overall productivity. Owing to the benefits and also to realize its complete potential in the business domain, extensive research and development works are conducted to further improve the quality while obliterating various design and operational constraints in robots. Latest techniques and algorithms are making robots smaller, safer, more practical, and cost-effective to be used by organizations in multiple industries such as manufacturing, construction, and healthcare. Moreover, the convergence of robotics with a wide range of complementary technologies such as machine vision, force sensing, speech recognition, and advanced mechanics is offering increased levels of functionality. Well positioned to fulfill the demand for robots in different industries is the Denmark based firm, Blue Ocean Robotics that identifies the users and their generic challenges to develop robots as the solution.

“We are not interested in building one specific robot for a single customer’s need,” begins Claus Risager, Co-CEO, Blue Ocean Robotics. “We aim to partner with an organization, which represents an industry along with its obstacles and create a robot that can be used globally in resolving that issue.” The company has a partnership program—RoBi-X—through which it collaborates with enterprises for designing, developing, and commercialization of its unique robotic solutions. RoBi-X consists of three partnership programs— RoBi-Design, RoBi-Develop, and RoBi- GoToMarket. After the solution attains certain level of maturity, Blue Ocean Robotics develops a separate spin-out company for managing it. Blue Ocean Robotics today has developed 14 robots and spin-out companies subsequently.

“We at Blue Ocean Robotics design all types of service robot technologies,” says Risager. “To manufacture these robots, we have to use multiple sensors and software for perceiving the environment and interact with it as well.” The company also develops robots with large amount of embedded Artificial Intelligence (AI) and often as part of their collaborative robots. This type of robot observes people, identifies them, adjusts its behavior according to the nearby people, and learns by accepting commands through gestures, voice or behavior observations.