Innorobo 2017 – Best In Show!

Last week I had the chance to attend the sixth edition of Innorobo, one of the biggest robotics and innovation summits in Europe, held at Les Docks de Paris.

The spacious venue is located just around the border of the French capital and has Saint Denis as its northern suburb. The site was originally built as a docking facility back in 1907 and since then has evolved into one of the largest meeting centers of the city and Île-de-France region.

Les Docks is made of several halls of varying size and the largest one, Dock Pullman, served as the main exhibition ground featuring around 150 companies that brought their most recent robotics technology to Paris this spring. All attendees were also able to participate in field tests of various robots at the nearby Dock Haussmann.

Given the size of the hall, it was easy to get lost, surrounded by so many robots, drones and alike, but a number of exhibitors did caught my special attention, so there we go with the personal highlights of the show:
 

Android tablet-powered humanoid robots

Witness the true power of the Google mobile OS! An Android tablet is used as CPU for the model R7 robots from THK that could be utilized for a variety of retail related and industrial tasks.
 

 

Colossus The Tank

We’re not exactly sure of the application of this robot that looks like a dwarfed tank. Yet, it was able to self-drive itself graciously through the crowds that gathered inside Dock Pullman on that day, just fine!
 

 

Sawyer and Ubuntu

Here’s Sawyer, a neat and compact robot on 4 wheels, whose behavior could be fully customized and programmed using the Sawyer Software Development Kit. Just don’t forget that it requires Ubuntu-powered PC to install the programming environment and SDK!
 

 

Stinger, he’s finally back

We just couldn’t ignore this robot, due to its striking resemblance of everyone’s favorite evil machine, from the not-so-distant future, featured in the famous Terminator franchise. This one’s named Stinger, it moves and produces creepy sounds, but its design purpose wasn’t announced, take a guess!
 

 

That was one busy day at Innorobo, but clearly that wasn’t enough to see all the innovative and advanced tech that exhibitors around the world had on display this year. For a more complete overview of the show, check this article and this cool video.