News - June 16, 2016. Decos has added new members to its robotics team to give an extra impulse to the activities in this area. The new employees are working on improving the reception robot. Currently, the robot must open the door for visitors to the company located in Noordwijk and accompany them to the coffee machine. Decos is preparing plans for establishing a successful robotics division.
Expanding functionalities
The new robotics team has added two new employees, Tiago Santos (23) and Roeland van Oers (34). Santos is a technical engineer and will be responsible for expanding the functionalities and activities of the reception robot. For instance, the robot will learn how to become increasingly more independent in navigating its way around and finding its charging station. Santos will also work on the robot’s capability to recognize and seek interaction with people. The goal is to give visitors a warm welcome.
Potential
Further, Decos has appointed Van Oers to the position of business development manager to study the market needs in-depth. The reception robot is not on the market yet, but Decos strongly believes in its potential. Robots can take over repetitive tasks from people so that they have more time to work on more important things. Exploratory talks with potential customers have shown that there is definitely an interest. What’s more, there are no clear competitors for the reception robot. Decos could be the first company in the Netherlands with this type of product.
AI
The investments in robotics have had a positive effect on the other Decos solutions as well. “The robot uses smart technologies and many of those technologies also find their way to our other services. Think about machine learning, advanced interaction with users and voice recognition. In this way, the investment in the robotics team benefits the whole company,” says Roel Noort, head of the innovation division.
70/20/10
The reception robot is one of the many innovative projects taking place at Decos. The company allocates its innovation budget based on a 70/20/10 model. 70 percent goes towards the further development of the core products, such as the JOIN suite for digitizing document and information flows. 20 percent goes towards product development of external and internal startups, such as Flo and Minute. And 10 percent goes towards ‘explore & learn’ innovation, whereby Decos wants to learn about technologies that could be revolutionary in the future, even before a full business case is ever created. The robotics projects are part of this last group.
