Words from the Robotics Rocking Chair (2 min read) 

This was my first year chairing the Robotics executive committee. Thanks to earlier, current members & Gemma Hadley our IET community manager for making sure we didn’t break anything. Although the covid restrictions have lifted we kept our committee meetings virtual. To help this along we increased the frequency to fortnightly and used a Kanban board to keep track of tasks needed for each interval, which was “kind’a’agile”.  
Looking at the rear cam view, we hosted a “Robotics in Action series” with presentations from Kuka, ABB, UR & Eiratech Robotics on recent installations in a time of lockdown. Thankfully robots don’t get covid. That said, many thanks to; Brian Cooney, Shane Loughran and Mark Gray for sharing advances in their product lines. These webinars are available on demand at the robotics webinars page. 

TAROS 2022 was attended by Claire Rocks, our Vice chair, who helped with some adjudication. This event is an excellent opportunity to network and see latest developments, if you can get some financial aid from your college or employer try and visit in 2023.   

Towards the end of the year the community was involved in the “Future of Manufacturing Automation" workshop on the invite of the IET Manufacturing group where Siemens and Royal mail engineering presented case studies.  Some insights into that event were posted on EngX  
Personally, it has been great to connect with the community along with members of the Manufacturing, Control & Automation and Vision and Imaging groups alike. We plan to collaborate more over the coming year as there is a lot of overlap between these interests and their technologies. I’d like to welcome Jeremy Hadall, Mostafa Hendawy, Shan Luo & Yewkee Lim to the Robotics executive team and look forward to exploring aspects of robotics together. We are looking for another executive member. If you feel up to the challenge of contributing to a few blogs, vlogs or events please request an application form from roboticstpn@ietvolunteers.org 

Looking into the crystal ball I can see an ambitious calendar of group collaborative and Robotics specific events for 2023 as follows: 

There are more events in the pipeline which we will confirm in Q2. Looking forward to seeing you in 2023. 

Best regards 
Eur Ing Alan Rossney C.Eng. FIET 
Robotics Community Chair 

#robotics #Medical Diagnostics #Vision and Imaging #manufacturing