Robotics and Process Automation

 

 Robotics and Process Automation

 

What is Robotics?

 

Robotics is an interdisciplinary field that integrates computer science and engineering. It involves the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrates mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, information engineering, mechatronics, electronics, bio-engineering, computer engineering, control engineering, and software engineering.

 

 

The concept of creating robots that can operate autonomously dates back to classical times, but research into the functionality and potential uses of robots did not grow substantially until the 20th century. Throughout history, it has been frequently assumed by various scholars, inventors, engineers, and technicians that robots will one day be able to mimic human behavior and manage tasks in a human-like fashion.

What is Automation?

Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes. It includes the use of various control systems for operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers, and heat-treating ovens, switching on telephone networks, steering, and stabilization of ships, aircraft, and other applications and vehicles with reduced human intervention. The benefit of automation includes labor savings, reducing waste, savings in electricity costs, savings in material costs, and improvements to quality, accuracy, and precision.

The World Bank's World Development Report 2019 shows evidence that the new industries and jobs in the technology sector outweigh the economic effects of workers being displaced by automation. The term automation, inspired by the earlier word automatic, was not widely used before 1947 when Ford established an automation department.

 

Robotic Process Automation

 

Robotic process automation is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots or artificial intelligence /digital workers. In contrast, RPA systems develop the action list by watching the user perform that task in the application's graphical user interface and then perform the automation by repeating those tasks directly in the GUI. This can lower the barrier to the use of automation in products that might not otherwise feature APIs for this purpose. RPA tools have strong technical similarities to graphical user interface testing tools.

 

 

As a form of automation, the concept has been around for a long time in the form of screen scraping, which can be traced back to early forms of malware. However, RPA is much more extensible, consisting of API integration into other enterprise applications, connectors into ITSM systems, terminal services, and even some types of AI services such as image recognition. A principal barrier to the adoption of self-service is often technological: it may not always be feasible or economically viable to retrofit new interfaces onto existing systems. Robotic automation software provides a pragmatic means of deploying new services in this situation, where the robots simply mimic the behavior of humans to perform the back-end transcription or processing.

Deployment

 

The hosting of RPA services also aligns with the metaphor of a software robot, with each robotic instance having its own virtual workstation, much like a human worker. The robot uses keyboard and mouse controls to take actions and execute automation. Normally all of these actions take place in a virtual environment and not on screen; the robot does not need a physical screen to operate, rather it interprets the screen display electronically. The scalability of modern solutions based on architectures such as these owes much to the advent of virtualization technology. 

The implementation of RPA in business enterprises has shown dramatic cost savings when compared to traditional non-RPA solutions.

• Banking and Finance Process Automation

• Mortgage and Lending Process

• Customer Care Automation

• eCommerce Merchandising Operation.

• OCR (Optical character recognition) Application

• Data Extraction Process

• Fixed automation process

   

   

Advantages

 

• Code-free:
  
  
  

RPA does not require any coding or programming knowledge. Hence, Employees only need to be trained on how RPA works, and they can easily create bots, just through GUI and different intuitive wizards. Besides, this platform reduces the initial cost of installation, training, and deployment.

• 
  Cost-Effectiveness: 

There will be no lunch breaks, holidays, sick leave, or shift time allocated for robotic automation. The increase in production at a lower cost produces obvious benefits for any manufacturer. The cost of investment can be recovered in a relatively short space of time and the gains from that point onward are exponential, to say the least.

• 
  Improved Quality Assurance:

Few workers enjoy doing repetitive tasks and after a certain period of time concentration levels will naturally decline. This lapse in concentration is known as vigilance decrement and can often lead to costly errors for the business and sometimes serious injury to the member of staff. Robotic automation eliminates these risks by accurately producing and checking items meet the required standard without fail.

• 
  Increased Productivity:

Using robotic automation to tackle repetitive tasks makes complete sense. Robots are designed to make repetitive movements. Humans, also by design, are not. Allowing staff members to expand on their skills and work in other areas will create a better environment from which the business as a whole will benefit. With higher energy levels and more focus put into their work, a product can only improve.

• 
  Security:

When an organization is running on automation, more users will demand access to RPA products. RPA tools provide options to assign role-based security capabilities to ensure action-specific permissions. The enterprise RPA tools also offer detailed statistics of the logging of users, their actions, as well as each executed task.

• 
  Work in Hazardous Environments:

Aside from potential injuries in the workplace, staff members in particular industries can be asked to work in unstable or dangerous environments. For example, if a high level of chemicals is present, robotic automation offers the ideal solution, as it will continue to work without harm.

Automated robots can minimize material waste and remove the need for humans to put themselves at unnecessary risk.

Disadvantages

• 
  Potential Job Losses:

One of the biggest concerns surrounding the introduction of robotic automation is the impact of jobs on workers. While these worries are understandable, they are not really accurate. Amazon is a great example of this. The employment rate has grown rapidly during a period where they have gone from using around 1,000 robots to over 45,000.

• Initial Investment Costs:

  
  
  

RPA is still in the stage of innovation, and so it can present challenges that may result in unwanted outcomes. Therefore, it isn't easy for organizations to decide whether they should invest in robotic automation or wait until its expansion. A comprehensive business case must be developed when considering the implementation of this technology; otherwise, it will be useless if returns are only marginal, which may not worth taking the risk.

• 
  Hiring Skilled Staff:

Over the past decade, manufacturers have found it harder to source skilled staff members to fill the specialized roles in their factories. The introduction of automation adds another layer to that conundrum as the robots require programming and a knowledge of how to operate them. In reality, this opens up further opportunities for existing employees to be trained and expand their own skillset.

• Employee Resistance:

  
  
  

People are usually habitual, and any change in the organization may cause stress to the employees. People who are involved in new technology will get new responsibilities, and they will have to learn new concepts of a specific technology. Because everyone may not have the same level of knowledge, it may lead existing employees to resign from their job.

Conclusion

 

Thus, due to the various benefits of RPA, its utilization is gradually increasing in the market worldwide. Most of the organizations are already implementing the RPA technology, as it optimizes the cost and frees the other resources. It is a cost-effective technique and also has non–financial benefits such as it consists of more accurate and consistent processes, which are less prone to errors. Nowadays, most organizations are using RPA for testing a particular application and eliminating the old testing tools due to their limitations.

 

 

DONE BY SY CS C Group - 5

1. Gaurav Patil

2. Akash Patil

3. Shashank Pathmudi

4. Samruddhi Parate

5. Diya Palresha