Within its first year, Blue Ocean Robotics in Lithuania has prepared several products ready for market. Now the Lithuanian division of the Danish firm is taking on its first autonomous project.
When Danish company Blue Ocean Robotics established its first subsidiary abroad, it chose the Baltic region’s largest country, Lithuania, as the place to do it. The company’s Lithuania office is still the only place outside Odense that has production and development functions, alongside sales. Giving the Lithuanian team so much responsibility has been done with good reason.
“Because a lot is happening in Lithuania on the technology front, we would like to set something up there,” explained Thomas Solupajev-Ronlev, co-founder of Blue Ocean Robotics in Lithuania, in 2014 on the Lithuania office’s establishment.
Whilst competitive costs play a role, it is specialist knowledge, skilled engineers and other highly-qualified professionals that have made it possible for the Lithuania team to develop autonomously.
Blue Ocean Robotics’ projects are excellent examples of effective cooperation between Denmark and Lithuania. Take Wallmo, the highly-successful wall mounting solution, for example. Wallmo was developed in cooperation with the Danish partitions manufacturer Deko. The collaboration was coordinated through Blue Ocean’s parent company in Odense, but the development, prototyping and testing have all been carried out in Lithuania. The Vilnius team is currently putting the finishing touches on the second prototype.
The Blue Ocean unit in Lithuania has had about 10 projects on the go in the year following its establishment. Out of these, two or three have either become spin-off companies already, or are on their way to doing so. This situation is made even more impressive by the fact that some of the projects are only in the initial phase of development.
This success has prompted Blue Ocean to take its Lithuanian operations to the next level. Cuebo, the first project for a Danish customer run purely under Lithuanian supervision, began this year.
Two Danish students are behind the idea for Cuebo. The robot is essentially an intelligent, running cube. Designed to be used in schools, it can be programmed for children to run on top of it using special square plastic pieces. Both the hardware and software are being developed by engineers in the Vilnius office, where Justinas Katkus, co-founder and CTO, expects to have a version on the market by late 2015.
Too much technology gets stranded between development and the market. Therefore, it is crucial for the people behind Blue Ocean Robotics to constantly have customers and the market in mind.
When product development is done together with the customer, naturally that design can then be used in several different places. The customer becomes a test case for a specific technology or product, and in return gets the first edition of the product, usually at lower prices, when it is mass produced.
After completion, the technologies and solutions will be sent out to separate companies and will be promoted by both the customer and Blue Ocean Robotics. Both Scape Technologies, a bin-picking solutions developer, and Wallmo have been involved with Blue Ocean in this way.
Read the full article at idag.dk
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