SAP is expanding its collaboration with UnternehmerTUM (UTUM), Europe’s leading center for entrepreneurship and innovation based at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). One of the latest outcomes of this collaboration is SafetyGuard, a prototype for automated safety inspections that combines artificial intelligence and robotics to detect workplace hazards and help companies comply with safety standards.
SafetyGuard was created as part of a program at UTUM’s Digital Product School—where teams of selected students work on real-world challenges—in just 12 weeks by a student team, “MIDAS,” and SAP Research & Innovation. This project illustrates just how effective cross-location collaboration with the ecosystem can be in rapidly creating prototypes as a foundation for product development at SAP.
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The objective of this particular prototyping project was to identify use cases in which robotics and AI could be seamlessly integrated into business processes. Based on its research and on user studies, team MIDAS pinpointed the reliable detection and documentation of safety risks as one such use case.
Safety inspections are essential in many industries, but they are often time-consuming and error-prone. SafetyGuard could change that: leveraging embodied AI, it makes inspections faster, more efficient, and more reliable, without increasing the workload for employees.
Embodied AI—the integration of artificial intelligence into physical robot systems—will be a focal point of investment and development work at SAP going forward.
SafetyGuard combines two technologies: modular robotics and AI-powered autonomy. In this prototype, robots, such as drones and humanoid systems capable of inspecting work environments without human intervention, are equipped with a specialized AI model that is trained, for example, to detect where protective equipment is missing and to automatically document safety-related incidents. What’s more, the robots can multitask. While they are carrying out inspections, they can transport materials and monitor machinery—an approach that combines efficiency gains with increased safety levels.
“SafetyGuard demonstrates just how effective our ecosystem approach is. In this project, an SAP team in Potsdam and a group of students in Munich joined forces and very quickly built a prototype that will have a real impact on product development,” Tobias Riasanow, head of Ecosystem Development at SAP Labs Germany, says. “It’s the perfect example of what SAP understands by ‘ecosystem development.’”
The project is also strategic to SAP in that SafetyGuard addresses real-life industry requirements and complements SAP’s solutions for environment, health, and safety management. The prototyping approach that led to SafetyGuard could therefore become part of the SAP portfolio in the future to help further reduce the time it takes to get from an idea to a product.
A close partnership
UnternehmerTUM (UTUM) (translates as “entrepreneurship”) was founded in 2002 and has become Europe’s largest center for innovation and business creation. Each year, its 500 employees support more than 120 scalable startups and 300 innovation projects. UTUM’s close links with leading industry partners create an environment in which new technologies can rapidly be deployed in real-world settings.
SAP has been working with UTUM since 2017. The non-profit organization is one of the founding partners of influential programs such as Digital Hub Mobility, Circular Republic, and Energy Innovation, which enable teams to test their ideas, validate them with partners, and hone them.
Programs with impact
To date, 13 prototypes have been developed for SAP under programs run by UTUM, all in close collaboration with product teams at SAP and directly related to their respective road maps. The programs offered by UTUM include:
- Innovation Sprint: Here, students have just one week to work on prototypes for solving specific user challenges. The most recent sprint, The Future of Retail with SAP Joule, produced five such prototypes, including solutions for intelligent inventory optimization, virtual shelf monitoring, and retail assistance systems.
- Digital Product School: This 12-week program for students is designed as a platform for developing executable software prototypes. One prototype created out of this program was Carbon Data Exchange, which is now part of SAP Sustainability Control Tower. Another is an application that makes it easier for developers to access the extensive documentation for SAP Field Service Management. Instead of wasting valuable time searching, they can simply type their questions into a chatbot and receive helpful answers, including code examples and direct links to the documentation they need.
- Multistakeholder projects: Additional prototypes have been created in longer-term programs such as Digital Hub Mobility and Circular Republic. Programs like these bring together experts from companies, startups, and research institutions over several months and allow SAP to test innovations in real-world customer and partner environments at an early stage in their development.
Co-innovation gets results—faster
The collaboration between SAP and UTUM shows how quickly ideas can lead to tangible results when students, researchers, and SAP teams work together to apply scientific approaches to real-life industrial challenges. SafetyGuard is an example of how embodied AI innovations can be created and how different groups of experts can benefit from one another.
“SafetyGuard demonstrates the extensibility of SAP’s approach to embodied AI. SAP’s embodied AI layer integrates the business context and triggers actions across the suite. SafetyGuard’s AI-native, manufacturer-agnostic design is scalable across different use cases and enables multitasking, allowing, for example, robots to process safety incidents while performing other tasks such as industrial asset inspections. SafetyGuard is a proof point for SAP for the added value of using cognitive robotics in safety scenarios.”
Adelya Fatykhova and Dr. Łukasz Ostrowski, Initiators and Supervisors of the student challenge
This first appeared on the German SAP News Center.
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