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In the third quarter of this year ABB saw strong demand, but supply chain constraints impacted revenues. They received orders for 7.9 billion dollar, reported a revenue of 7.0 billion, and an income from operations of 852 million. “In the face of a difficult supply chain environment, I am pleased that we achieved a good margin this quarter. Our cash generation was very strong, leaving ample headroom on our balance sheet to support both organic growth and acquisitions as well as rewarding shareholders” said CEO Björn Rosengren.

Robot orders in the second quarter of 2021 were up 67% over the same period in 2020, showing a return to pre-COVID 19 pandemic demand for automation as manufacturers and other North American companies return to business. According to the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), North American companies ordered 9,853 robots valued at $501 million in Q2 2021, up from 5,196 sold in Q2 2020, the peak of the pandemic.

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.5% from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner.

Arnaud Greffet, manager of Safran Finance Services, the Finance Shared Services Centre (SSC) of the Safran group, shares his experience of the robotisation of processes.

Trimble announced the release of the Trimble X7 3D laser scanner and Trimble FieldLink software fully integrated with Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot. This solution is jointly developed with Boston Dynamics, and it facilitates autonomous operation on construction sites and takes advantage of the robot’s capabilities to navigate challenging, dynamic and potentially unsafe environments. 

Gartner today announced the top strategic technology trends that organisations need to explore in 2022. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas, which is taking place virtually through Thursday. Among those trends are Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI Engineering, Hyperautomation and Autonomic Systems.

CaliBurger, announced it will open a restaurant with robotic food preparation, and a seamless ordering and payment system that leverages opt-in facial recognition and cashless payments. Located in Shoreline just north of Seattle, the new CaliBurger location will feature Flippy, an autonomous robot system taking over the work of an entire fry station.

More and more major IT providers are paying attention to Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and are incorporating this into their own solutions. For example, Salesforce recently announced that RPA will be a part of its Einstein and Mulesoft portfolio. Rocking Robots talked about this with John Kucera, SVP of Product Management at Salesforce.

The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), the first autonomous racecar competition at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, is preparing for thousands of fans to attend. On October 23, 2021, 21 universities from 9 countries forming 9 teams will compete in this first-of-its kind competition. The teams will be competing for $1 million in prize money, which will be used to advance the education and research missions of the winning universities.

UiPath announced a partnership with Snowflake that integrates UiPath Insights with Snowflake’s platform. UiPath Insights is a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) analytics solution that measures, reports, and aligns enterprise automation operations with strategic business outcomes. This combined offering of UiPath with Snowflake’s compute, elastic scaling, and enterprise-grade secure data sharing capabilities provides customers with faster data processing, while enabling them to perform long-term historical analysis.