DETROIT — The automotive and logistics industries are not any strangers to robots.

They’re among the many most closely invested companies in automation within the U.S. economic system, utilizing robots to type packages, transport items and help in constructing automobiles.

However different industries the place robotics have not but taken maintain could also be potential funding alternatives and growth areas for automation corporations within the coming years.

These rising areas intrigue Jeff Burnstein, an automation-industry guru and president of the Affiliation for Advancing Automation. His commerce group represents greater than 1,000 international corporations concerned in robotics, machine imaginative and prescient, movement management, and motors and associated applied sciences.

Burnstein, who not too long ago acquired a prestigious award for his greater than 40 years within the {industry}, believes automation and robotics might tremendously help in doing the “uninteresting, soiled, harmful jobs” that individuals do not essentially need to do.

“Should you have a look at what’s driving numerous the automation in lots of industries it is scarcity of individuals,” he stated on the sidelines of an automation conference final week in Detroit.

Labor shortages, led by the manufacturing {industry}, are the important thing driver within the progress of automation, he stated.

Listed here are three industries Burnstein predicts are subsequent for automation:

The agriculture {industry} is already testing or utilizing varied automated, if not autonomous, applied sciences to make operations extra environment friendly and safer. It additionally serves to chop prices

Tractor maker Deere & Co., for instance, provides a set of automated-assistance options comparable to turning and steerage for crop row strains. Deere is engaged on an autonomous tractor that may “see, suppose, and work by itself, releasing up time for farmers to finish different duties concurrently,” in accordance with its web site.

Different automated applied sciences for agriculture embrace drones that may spray pesticides over crops, remote-controlled tractors, automated harvesting techniques, and different information and logistics farming apps.

Harvesting and sorting rooster components is strictly the sort of uninteresting, soiled, harmful jobs automation might help in doing, Burnstein says.

On the automation conference, not less than two corporations have been showcasing food-sorting robots whose skills included figuring out what sorts of cuts match right into a tray for packaging.

Past effectivity benefits, there are well being and security advantages, too, advocates level out.

“The machine cannot sneeze. It could’t rub its face. It could’t have hair fall into something. So, it is actually secure. And fewer fingers touching it, the much less introduction for any illness,” stated Anthony Romeo, a consultant of Massachusetts-based corporations Cognex Corp. and Smooth Robotics, one of many corporations engaged on sorting meals and rooster components, who additionally attended the conference.

In 2021, Tyson Meals stated it might make investments over $1.3 billion in new automation capabilities by means of 2024 to extend yields and scale back each labor prices and related dangers — and finally ship financial savings for the meat processor.

Tyson CEO Donnie King final month instructed buyers the corporate is constant to “put money into automation and digital capabilities with alternatives to enhance our yield.”

He stated the corporate has 50 strains for deboning chickens which are totally automated.

Pilgrim’s Pleasure, one of many world’s largest rooster producers, additionally has introduced substantial investments in automation, together with greater than $100 million it introduced in 2021.

Automation in well being care could possibly be viable in quite a lot of instances — from transportation of products and private medicines to somebody’s bedside, to cleansing and disinfecting instruments.

“You are able to do that robotically,” Burnstein stated. “Should you’re having bother discovering those that could possibly be resolution. There’s all types of these issues after which drug discovery, in fact, and different purposes.”

One notable firm at the moment within the house is Aethon, a Pittsburgh-based robotics firm that is made strides within the health-care sector with an autonomous cellular robotic known as the TUG. The robots are able to navigating round a hospital independently, in accordance with the corporate’s web site.

The TUG may be programmed to keep away from obstacles and even function elevators, in accordance with the corporate.

It is one instance of an AMR, or autonomous cellular robotic: a kind of car that may carry out a number of totally different supply duties, which Burnstein known as “scorching in automation” in the meanwhile.