GK spoke with Hiroshi Ogasawara about Yaskawa’s commitment to research and development and its pursuit of next-generation robotics and motion control solutions.
What products currently make up the majority of your business in terms of sales, and which areas are you looking to for further growth?
Our company is involved in both factory and process automation, but the number one focus for us is factory automation. For the medical field, it’s more so experimentation and genome analysis. As for agriculture, we will need another 20 years to see this space in robotics flourish.
We are doing business in various industries such as steel and mining but it always takes time for robotics technology to be implemented by manufacturers. In the case of the automotive industry, we first saw robotics introduced in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 20 to 30 years later that we saw wide adoption of the technology. It has been similar across many industries. What we do today is not seen by the general public, but its effects are seen much later on.
What role has R&D played in developing new technologies and keeping up with market demand? What new projects or areas of the industry are your company looking to develop next?
We believe that innovation is the foundation of our corporation.
Yaskawa is a technology-based corporation and that is how we thrive. We do our best to attract the best and brightest to build up our research and development teams to supply new knowledge and help stimulate the creation of new ideas that contribute to our company’s growth. This is why we have created our technology research center in the headquarters.
When it comes to cutting-edge technology such as AI, we have developed a new business that is completely focused on this. This business is led by specialists in the industry that can help us create better software. It is still unclear whether or not AI will contribute to the development of factory automation. It is hard to imagine that factory automation will grow further than what we have developed today. We have seen many companies apply AI technology to robotics, but so far the results we are seeing through the data collected during this process show similar results to what we get without it.
How has your company expanded into the global market and what are your plans for further international growth?
Our first advantage is our in-house production of motion control related parts. Only two robotics companies globally, us and Fanuc, are able to do this. We actually, expanded into robotics because of our success in servo motors and other mechanical parts, which is how we were able to develop this model. Our management stance is to have our customers win the market and share a portion of their profits. By continuing to do that, we can continue to win.
