Lars Dalgaard has worked with robot technology for more than 20 years as entrepreneur, teacher, lecturer, researcher, consultant, and since 2014 as Head of Service Robotics at the Danish Technological Institute, Robot Technology. Technology-wise his focus is on flexible mobile robots for logistics in industry and healthcare, and on civil deployment of autonomous drones for inspection and manipulation. Solution-wise his focus is on system-level design where the value proposition is created in the intersection between the technical, organisational, human, and economic needs and demands. Through the years, he's worked with robot technology in all shapes and sizes spanning from field robots and mobile robots for nursery gardens, over self- reconfigurable modular robots and modular robot technology for dynamic layout changes in pig stables, to butler robots and interactive room barriers.
Lars Dalgaard shares his experiences developing robots in many different contexts.
We hear about Lars’ early work with large mobile robotics in a commercial nursery garden handling the transfer of plants from the greenhouse to the field.
He also speaks about the Hydra project a self re-configuring modular robotics project that developed several different modular robotics systems including the Atron system.
Lars felt that there was a problem with the process used to introduce robotics and automation into society. Commercialization was hard and unreliable mostly because there was no focus on designing a complete system. This lead to an industrial PhD done at the Danish Technological Institute (DTI) focusing on a system level design approach.
He then talks about his work at DTI that focuses on transferring research, knowledge and research results from academia into companies and the Danish society in general.
One project Lars has been working on is augmenting mobile platforms so that they can handle tasks as they move around in a production facility. This also aims to make it easier to program the mobile platforms and any systems added to them.
Lars thinks that looking at the bigger picture and bringing multiple partners and end users into projects, and doing so early, can bring big benefits to a project.
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