OODA Loop was on the road this Spring, doing Field Research at Several Notable Spring 2024 Conferences – including Automate 2024: North America’s largest robotics and automation event held in Chicago, IL, in early May. High-level takeaways from the OODA Loop research team can be found here.

Association for Advancing Automation (A3), Automate 2024 Trade Show and Conference

A3’s Automate 2024: Major Breakthroughs in Automation Technology

Automate 2024:  Automation was broadly defined in a wide variety of industry sectors and sub-sectors by A3 (The Association for the Advancement of Automation). This trade show and conference was big and overwhelming for first-timers, but it was time to get out into the field to see this community of practice in their native habitat and how they are framing the problem set and solutions:  “Automation isn’t just the future. It’s the here and now—and at Automate 2024. As North America’s largest robotics and automation event, this is the place for anyone working with or curious about automation. Come discover what’s next for your business—and your industry.”

Attendance at the Automate 2024 Trade Show and Conference was likened to an anthropological and ethnographic research experience by the OODA Loop team.  Cross-sector questions of automation are bespoke to each industry sector.  The research team was looking to bolster their understanding of this space, which is admittedly not an area of subject matter expertise relative to other themes researched by the team (AI, metaverse, the bioeconomy, future of warfare, etc.).  One member of the team noted: “We were really looking for how to find edge cases and differentiate our automation coverage, not just “autonomous and the way it’s impacting DOD and like the future of warfare”, but trying to branch out. The News Brief team at OODA Loop is doing a great job at filtering and curating on the topic, but we are trying to determine the best series on the topic for OODA Loop’s Original Analysis section of the website. We are also looking at convergence and praxis, consistent with the theme of OODAcon 2024.”

OODA Loop Researchers were also keen to assess the impact of the metaverse, digital engineering, and digital twins on the professional automation community – and the general branding and messaging about such technologies at the show and the conference.  Discussions and presentations at the event included topics such as digital transformation, automation, and emerging technologies like AI.  There were a lot of a lot of discussions on the topic of cybersecurity in critical infrastructure at the event, including on the showroom floor. The conversation highlighted the importance of cybersecurity within critical infrastructure and its significance in the industry.

What Next?

Tesla Optimus humanoid Robot Demo May 2024

Figure Status Update – OpenAI Speech-to-Speech Reasoning

During the May 2024 OODA Network Monthly Meeting, Insights and Takeaways from Spring 2024 Conferences and Field Research Efforts were discussed.

Follow-up research areas discussed by the network based on the AUTOMATE 2024 field research include:

• AI and the Human Factor:  Automation versus Augmentation
• Humanoid Robotics:  A network member referenced humanoid robots like the Tesla Optimus or Figure 01 (see videos above), indicating a specific focus on this type of robotics technology. The conversation highlighted interest and engagement with the topic, with participants discussing the presence and potential impact of humanoid robots at  AUTOMATE 2024 – demonstrating a significant level of attention and interaction around this emerging technology – with a rough estimate that about 10% of the showroom floor was dedicated to humanoid robotics automation at the event.  It was telling, however, that Optimus and Figure 01 were not necessarily a big, disruptive marketing and branding presence on the showroom floor.

Automate 2024 Rewind

For highlights from Automate 2024, browse the library of on-demand digital content – including keynotes, Automate LIVE interviews, and exhibitor spotlights – at this link.   Playlists Include the following categories:

• Featured Videos
  • Automate 2024 Recap
  • Engelberger Award Winners
  • Keynotes
• Emerging Industries and Applications
• Factory of the Future for Manufacturing
• Fueling Industrial Innovation
• Solving Labor and Production Challenges
• Robotics

Additional OODA Loop Resources

The Future of Automation In All Its Forms:  In a series of posts entitled Autonomous Everything, we explored automation in all its technological forms, including legacy working assumptions about the term itself.  Autonomy is not just for the future of the car and personal mobility but includes powerful platforms in a broad autonomous future.  We began the series in June at the bleeding edge of autonomous vehicles, with a description of the first autonomous ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

Automation, as a subject for OODA Loop research and analysis, cuts a broad swath across many industry verticals.  Specific areas of interest emerged that we thought would be of interest to the OODA Loop membership:

Security Automation: Specifically, using automation for repetitive and time-consuming tasks for external cyber threats and internal information technology security. What are the safety and risk variables of this type of IT-based automation?

Automation and the Workforce: How is this implemented, and what are the objectives? Efficiencies?  Collaboration?  Scalability? Cost-cutting?  Innovation in operations? Does this type of automation always map back to a reduction in the workforce?

Automation – or Augmentation – of the workforce:  The perennial debate surrounding robotics automation of the workforce is whether will jobs be 100% automated (with large-scale job elimination and job loss).  Or will there always be a need for a human factor in certain industry verticals,  translating into machine augmentation of certain tasks and operations, which a human operator integrated into the robotics design?

Autonomous Vehicles as Automation: This one is a bit tricky: but think of an autonomous fleet of trucking vehicles, for example, as one automated system in a larger production and distribution ecosystem or supply chain.  Where is the innovation at this economy of scale? How do the business issues differ, if at all, at this scale of operations?

Automation of AI/Machine Learning Training Models:  Can and should machine learning models retrain automatically?  Should there be a human touchpoint integrated into this retraining process, to guard against biases becoming embedded into an AI system and/or the risk of AI Accidents when retraining is left unsupervised prematurely?

Automation Case Studies:  Where are the best-in-class examples of automation, in the federal space and the private sector, worth researching and analyzing for strategic insights?

Industry Standardization:  Like TCP/IP (or any of the IEEE ISO standards) what are the emergent industry standards which will allow for seamless interoperability and widespread commercial scalability?  Are some commercial releases operating in a ‘closed garden” architecture?  If so, is there a clear competitive advantage to such an approach?