From MIT's Technology Review, February 26:
Tourists to Odense, Denmark, come for the city’s rich history and culture: It’s where King Canute, Denmark’s last Viking king, was murdered during the 11th century, and the renowned fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was born there some 700 years later. But today, Odense (with a population just over 210,000) is also home to more than 150 robotics, automation, and drone companies. It’s particularly renowned for collaborative robots, or cobots—those designed to work alongside humans, often in an industrial setting. Robotics is a “darling industry” for the city, says Mayor Peter Rahbæk Juel, and one its citizens are proud of.
Odense’s robotics success has its roots in the more traditional industry of shipbuilding. In the 1980s, the Lindø shipyard, owned by the Mærsk Group, faced increasing competition from Asia and approached the nearby University of Southern Denmark for help developing welding robots to improve the efficiency of the shipbuilding process. Niels Jul Jacobsen, then a student, recalls jumping at the chance to join the project; he’d wanted to work with robots ever since seeing Star Wars as a teenager. But “in Denmark [it] didn’t seem like a possibility,” he says. “There was no sort of activity going on.”
That began to change with the partnership between the shipyard and the university. In the ’90s, that relationship got a big boost when the foundation behind the Mærsk shipping company funded the creation of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute (MMMI), a center dedicated to studying autonomous systems. The Lindø shipyard eventually wound down its robotics program, but research continued at the MMMI. Students flocked to the institute to study robotics. And it was there that three researchers had the idea for a more lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use industrial robot arm. That idea would become a startup called Universal Robots, Odense’s first big robotics success story. In 2015, the US semiconductor testing giant Teradyne acquired Universal Robots for $285 million. That was a significant turning point for robotics in the city. It was proof, says cofounder Kristian Kassow, that an Odense robotics company could make it without being tied to a specific project, like the previous shipyard work. It was a signal of legitimacy that attracted more recognition, talent, and investment to the local robotics scene...
....MUCH MORE
Related in spirit from November 2021:
HBR: "Bologna Shows How a Business Cluster Can Stay Vibrant for Centuries"
