ZURICH, Feb. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- ABB, the
world-leading supplier of industrial robots, and Silicon Valley AI
start-up, Covariant, today announced a partnership to bring
AI-enabled robotics solutions to market, starting with a fully
autonomous warehouse order fulfilment solution.
The partnership brings together the two companies with a shared
vision for robotics enabled by AI, where intelligent robots work
alongside humans in dynamic environments, collectively learning and
improving with every task completed.
Given the accelerated global growth experienced in the
e-commerce sector, ABB identified a significant opportunity for
AI-enabled robotics solutions across a broad range of applications
including logistics, warehousing, and parcels and mail sorting.
Global revenues in e-commerce are expected to increase by over 50
percent within the next five years, rising from 1.7 trillion Euros in 2019 to 2.6 trillion Euros in 2024, according to
Statista.
The growing demand for e-commerce fulfilment services and the
complex and labor-intensive nature of the process offers unique
potential for intelligent automation. The market is growing at a
steady pace (4-5% CAGR) and is expected to reach a value of
51.3 billion Euros by 2021, according
to procurement intelligence firm Beroe Inc. Today, warehouse
operations are labor intensive, and the industry struggles to find
and retain employees for picking and packing. While robots are
ideally suited to repetitive tasks, until now they lacked the
intelligence to identify and handle tens of thousands of constantly
changing products in a typical dynamic warehouse operation.
ABB launched a global competition in 2019 to assess 20 leading
AI technology start-ups on their approach to solutions for 26
real-world picking, packing and sorting challenges. The aim was to
understand if AI is mature enough to unlock the potential for
robotics and automation in the segment. ABB also sought a
technology partner with which to co-develop a robust AI solution
capable of supporting autonomous materials handling, enabling its
robots to handle items of infinite variety.
The Covariant Brain is a universal AI that allows robots to see,
reason and act in the world around them, completing tasks too
complex and varied for traditional programmed robots. Covariant's
software enables robots to engage in reinforcement learning:
adapting to new tasks on their own through trial and error and
therefore constantly broadening the range of objects they can
pick.
"Our partnership with Covariant is part of our strategy to
expand into new growth sectors such as distribution and e-commerce
and to leverage the scaling potential in these fields. It perfectly
complements our offering and adds to our aim to be the number one
choice in robotics solutions for our customers. Through the
combination of artificial intelligence with our robots, we are
opening an entire new field of opportunities and applications for a
variety of industries," said Sami
Atiya, President of ABB's Robotics and Discrete Automation
business.
"If you want to advance artificial intelligence, we now need to
take it out of the laboratory and apply it to the real world. We
are delighted to be able to work with ABB to create AI Robotics
solutions for customers worldwide, benefitting from ABB's nearly
five decades of domain knowledge and expertise in deploying
automation systems into the most demanding industrial
environments," said Peter Chen,
Covariant's chief executive and co-founder.
The first installation of the ABB and Covariant AI-enabled
solution is already being deployed at Active Ants (part of the
bpost group), a leading provider of e-commerce fulfilment services
for web businesses in Utrecht in
the Netherlands.
ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) is a technology leader that is
driving the digital transformation of industries. With a history of
innovation spanning more than 130 years, ABB has four,
customer-focused, globally leading businesses: Electrification,
Industrial Automation, Motion, and Robotics & Discrete
Automation, supported by the ABB Ability™ digital platform. ABB's
Power Grids business will be divested to Hitachi in 2020. ABB
operates in more than 100 countries with about 144,000
employees. www.abb.com
Covariant is building the Covariant Brain: universal AI
that allows robots to see, reason and act on the world around them.
Founded in 2017 by the world's top AI researchers and roboticists
from UC Berkeley and OpenAI, Covariant is bringing the latest
artificial intelligence research breakthroughs to the biggest
industry opportunities. The company is headquartered in
Berkeley, CA. For more
information, visit covariant.ai
View original content to download
multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/covariant-and-abb-partner-to-deploy-integrated-ai-robotic-solutions-301010367.html
SOURCE Covariant