SAP and UnternehmerTUM Drive Co-Innovation in Embodied AI

SAP announced that it is expanding its collaboration with UnternehmerTUM, Europe’s leading center for entrepreneurship and innovation based at the Technical University of Munich. 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.

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.

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:

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.

Source: SAP media announcement