COVID-19 Impact on Industrial Robotics and Drones in the Semiconductor and Electronics Industry

Coronavirus outbreak caused a deeper impact on the human, economies, industries, and other factors too. It impacted the almost first half of the global economy by initiating lockdown to control the spread of the virus almost in every country. Governments of various countries initiated lockdown for a certain period to reduce the spread formed by human physical interaction. Manufacturing facilities, sport, entertainment, transportation, and other industries are shut down except for the companies which are dealing with COVID-19 and are only allowed to run their operations. Now, after almost six months of the year 2020, the manufacturing facilities and other industrial verticals are restarting their operations with some mandate precaution measures. The factories are started to reopen by taking some preventive measures such as 20% to 50% employees on the field, social distancing, extreme hygiene measures among others.
It is supporting the economy and consumers' goods production needs at a certain level due to the restriction of limited manpower utilization. It impacted the entire industrial sector but in robotics and drones, it has created an opportunity to grow rather than declining the market growth. As companies or service sectors are replacing human resources with robots in the field such as COVID-19 detecting robots, automatic robotics arms at manufacturing, and delivery drones among others. The visibility of the market has increased due to the rising importance of the robotics solution to control such a pandemic situation. Space is a big constraint for the industries and maintaining physical distancing as the new regulation is not feasible for every organization, hence to resolve this issue currently robotics and automation are the prominent solutions for almost every industry and service sector from the grocery store to manufacturing plant.
Not only companies but even hospitals are also adopting robotics into the operational field in this COVID-19 situation such as a company named JD from China is utilizing the delivery robots. The ATRIS, AIMBOT, and Cruz robots line of the UBTECH Robotics company are used by the Shenzhen hospital for Covid-19 patients. The robots are helping the service sector such as hospitals to contain the contagion and alleviate the strain on human personnel. Such development in the robotic solutions and adoption by the industries is driving the market growth.

IMPACT ON THE INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS AND DRONES MARKET
COVID-19 hampered the various industrial verticals from small component manufactures to the automotive, machines and other equipment manufacturing companies. Initially, it hampered the industrial robotics and drones market but post lockdown relief has created a major opportunity and demand for this market. The importance or picture of the robotics manufacturing, drones based surveillance and other technologies become more visible for the customers. A robotics arms witnessed tremendous demand in the healthcare and medical device manufacturing companies.
For instance,
In May 2020, ST Robotics a manufacturer of the bench-top robot arms witnessed strong demand for the robots from the market. To meet emerging demands, company is increasing their production capabilities for the healthcare robotics arms.
Similarly the demand for the drones is also increasing for the industrial application for various uses such as facility surveillance, hygiene, logistic and others.
For instance,
In June 2020, Skygauge introduced new inspection drones for the industrial spaces to reopen the facility with enhanced security and safety. The company introduced new Spot named drone to patrol areas and provide facility staff view. According to the Skygauge, a 2 week job can be completed with the help of industrial drone by 2 inspectors.
Global industrial robotics and drones market has strong growth ahead as the pandemic situation opened lots of possibilities for the market to increase their offering.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE MARKET IN COVID-19 SITUATION
The market players have strong opportunity to increase their presence and share in the market by introducing advanced solution for the industries. A robotics and drones market is marking an exponential growth from past few years and COVID-19 has further boosted its importance. Market players have tremendous opportunity to increase their share with development of new solution for medical devices, consumer goods, COVID essential goods and other application.
To target the small manufacturers
Social distancing with fewer square feet is very difficult for the small manufacturers as they almost have less than 50,000 square feet of operational area. The sale order is increased while production capabilities are lowered due to imitated staff to overcome this industrial robotics is great solution.
Introduce the drones to hygiene application
For instance,
In April 2020, Garuda Aerospace a startup firm introduced new drone for varied area including sanitization, surveillance, mapping, agriculture spraying, security, industries and for delivery.
Company introduced new unmanned aerial vehicles which has the capacity for disinfecting the 3.28 million sq. km area. Such drones will be helpful for the manufacturing facilities to disinfect the facility after shift rotation or shift overs.

Introduce disinfectant-bots for the production facilities
For instance,
In April 2020, Blue Ocean Robotics introduced a new solution for the production facilities to keep the area disinfected. A UVD robot has been introduced by the company to kill harmful microorganisms. Such type of the new robots for industrial cleaning application will help the market to grow at significant rate.

IMPACT ON SUPPLY AND DEMAND
Industrial robotics and drones has strong demand in the market owing to improved safety and performance offered by them. Even before the pandemic situation, the market witnessed significant increase in the CAGR owing to transformation of industries towards automation. Now, COVID-19 enhanced its importance which is augmenting the market growth and supposed to increase CAGR in forecast period of the 2020-2027.

WORLDWIDE SUPPLY OF INDUSTRIAL ROBOTS
Source: IFR
CONCLUSION
The pandemic situation has increased the importance of industrial robotics and drones to replace the complicated task of humans by robots. Rising awareness about the robots and drones among customers and the government is supposed to supplement the growth of the market in the forecasted period. The overall market has a strong opportunity ahead to increase their presence and target the untapped market for industrial robots and drones. Increasing demand for the medical devices, PPE kits, hygiene liquids, and others itself driving the growth of industrial robotics and drones market. For instance, in July 2020, according to the Annex Business Media article Roche, Molecular Solutions adopted the ABB robots for the COVID-19 tests. In the same articles also stated that JR Automation partnered with General Motors to implement industrial robots for the medical mask assembly line. Such rising importance and development of the solution for the new application are supposed to drive the market growth in the forecast period.