While robotics competitions aren’t currently threatening the Superbowl for number of viewers or sponsorship dollars, they’re important enough in the world of robotics that they’re being discussed as a sport.
Sports are obviously more important in our culture than mere contests. Try bragging about your all-region choir placement while someone else brags about his all-state basketball experience if you don’t believe us.
So there are benefits to being a sport, and it could help increase national interest and investment in robotics if robotics competitions moved out of chess match territory and into basketball territory.
In the meantime, robotics competitions provide opportunities to get hands-on experience and training in robotics. They also give participants an opportunity to catch the eye of an investor or a company like Rexroth in order to move into a career in robotics through internships, apprenticeship, or entrepreneurship.
Robohub is conducting a survey on participant experiences in robotics competitions. They want to find out how robotics competitions affect participants, coaches, organizers, and other stakeholders in education, research, and business.
If you’ve been involved with robotics competitions, please click through and take their survey, and share it with your colleagues. We’ll be interested to see the results.
Right now, U.S. companies have a hard time finding qualified workers to operate industrial motion control machinery as it becomes more sophisticated. Reshoring requires workers with more sophisticated skills, workers who are able to take a collaborative approach to working with robots, and engineers who understand new kinds of automation.
U.S. manufacturers also need help with legacy motion control, both to keep it running while they decide what kind of investment they want to make in new technologies and to determine how best to incorporate functional legacy machines with new ones.
We specialize in legacy and new Rexroth electric motion control. We offer phone support, field support, factory repair and REMAN, and assistance in design and configuration of motion control systems.