In addition to more humans, Croatian economy should employ more robots as well.
For its size, Croatian economy should have about 2,000 robots, and according to estimates there are currently just 175 robots used in industry, which means that there should be 1,800 more robots. The increased use of robots can be considered one of the main ways to increase productivity, announced the Croatian Chamber of Economy, reports Poslovni.hr on January 4, 2017.
Croatian Chamber of Economy (HGK), in cooperation with the Nikola Tesla Innovation Centre and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is part of the CROBOHUB project, which aims to establish a regional competence centre for robotics within the Nikola Tesla Innovation Centre (ICENT), according to a statement from the Croatian Chamber of Commerce.
“It is estimated that the Croatian economy should have 2,000 robots, and currently there are just 175, which speaks volumes about the untapped potential and the need for further development and investments”, said Emil Perić, head of HGK’s Department of Technology Development and IT.
He said that current project activities were focused on the analysis and assessment of the regional ecosystem, identifying key stakeholders and drafting a feasibility study to define the project of robotics development. That would, among other things, enable networking of national and regional stakeholders with specific activities such as workshops and cooperation with manufacturing companies, with the ultimate goal of helping entrepreneurs efficiently apply robotics in business.
Through the EU’s I4SM initiative, the project is globally focused on the use of ICT technologies in production process which bring us closer to the fourth industrial revolution, characterized by universal digitization within which the entire production, sales and supply chain are based on ICT and cybernetic machines.
Perić explains that, contrary to popular belief that robots will replace human work, there will actually be need for additional staff which will be able to control robots, service them and produce new ones. Similarly, he claims that the area of human-robot cooperation has not yet been sufficiently analyzed.
“Many stakeholders in the economy which are engaged in production processes do not see robots as a threat. Given the state of the Croatian economy, with a lack of skilled labour and the workforce in general, with many industrial sectors based on low wages, robotics can be seen as a way to increase productivity, or even perhaps as the only way to do that”, he said.
