The industrial robotics market has grown considerably over the previous decade and, despite the challenges of the coronavirus, early results suggest 2021 will be a year of record sales and investments. But while the industry is seeing high growth, questions remain about the safety of these robotic systems. This issue is becoming even more acute as more robots are expected to be mobile and will need to navigate through the use of advanced sensors.

There are key demands for the future robotics environment that are driving innovation—the need for functional safety and mission-critical communications, the need for increasingly capable and centralized computing architectures to replace individual microcontrollers, and the need for ultra-low latency.

To satisfy these challenges, robotics vendors increasingly look to real-time operating systems (RTOS) as a key software enabler, but adoption is highly varied. While many fixed industrial vendors have used proprietary RTOSs for years, newer mobile robotics startups utilize general-purpose or open source solutions. As the demands for safety increase over the next decade, added importance will be attributed to proprietary RTOS vendors who can offer a higher level of certification and help orchestrate the increasing amount of data generated by robots.

In this webinar, ABI Research and BlackBerry QNX will outline the role of RTOS vendors in the robotics industry and the importance of proprietary RTOS vendors in delivering functional safety to the industrial robotics ecosystem.

whitton-headshot-2020 Rian Whitton
Principal Analyst
Michael Chalupa (1) Michael Chalupa
Field Application Engineer
BlackBerry QNX Horizontal