Ready, Set, Robot

If I ever have a grandchild who is a famous pilot, some author can point out that this person’s great-grandfather was born the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. And the grandfather was born the same year man entered space. Or, if that grandchild turns out to be a leading industrial engineer, one could say the grandfather was born the same year a robot first went to work in a manufacturing plant.

It seems a lot like The Year of the Robot is here—but it’s taken 61 years to arrive. Why so long?

Let’s look at aviation as a comparison. It took a long, long time for aviation to advance from a minute jaunt on the eastern seaboard to the very first 747—66 years, as a matter of fact. By 1970, the year of the first commercial flights of the 747, aviation had found its ultimate best application: flying people around for money. Up until the late 1930s, people were seen as optional add-ons because the real money was in carrying mail and bank checks. After World War II personal mobility was desirable, putting people to work in multiple geographies and meeting clients nationwide.

When first launched, a ticket on the 747 from Australia to London cost an Aussie about half a year’s salary. Today, it’s less than a week’s pay (although in his excellent article, https://www.airlineratings.com/news/white-knuckles-first-747-flight-over-52-years-ago/, author Steve Creedy also points out that seats have shrunk 10cm).

Switch to robotics. The first applications for Unimate, as I point out in this article https://fifthwavemfg.com/robots-and-automation-come-to-their-senses/, were quite simple. It would hold an object or stack objects, and at an early point spot-welding was added to its roster of duties. Welding, in fact, is the biggest application for today’s robots, accounting for 25 percent of robot “employment.” Other big applications include pick and place, palletizing, and–combined with machine vision–sorting and inspecting.

These applications haven’t been enough to capture fabricators’ imaginations mostly because pick and place and palletizing are better automated in the world of consumer package goods and other discrete worlds. A fabricator doesn’t package parts, then put those packages into other packages, ready to be deployed on a retail shelf somewhere.

Until now fabricators have been eager to take advantage of what robotics has to offer but most stay on the sidelines. Some have jumped into the market with cobot welding. The cobots have been easy to train and manage in this growth area (which is very different from the existing robotic welding market that includes a significant automotive component).

Why fabricators are getting interested, getting in

Things are changing for fabricators. As with any big market change (like that in aviation), the changes come from inside the technology space as well as in the intended manufacturing concern and the market generally. What’s the external driving force? Well, for at least a dozen years fabricators have been Diogenes with his lamp, looking not for an honest man but someone who would show up on time and would be reliable and alert and would work.

The magic application for fabricators is machine tending. Vision systems are pairing with robots to make a substantial mark in this and other industrial applications. They can spot a part to be bent, bring it to the jaws of the press brake, bend the part, and stack it for removal later. Essentially, that’s what an operator does. And if you can’t find an operator, doesn’t it make sense to purchase something that can do what an operator does? Plus, as Will Knight pointed out in a January 2022 article in Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/rent-robot-worker-less-paying-human/), you can rent a robot for 8 bucks an hour, opening robots as a service. It will be like software as a service, or virtual servers. You pay for the access and the use. Included is maintenance and upkeep.

A lack of people is the magic market condition that will drive growth. Most market research I’ve seen predicts big growth by 2030, and these same studies generally put the growth rates at 11-22% CAGR. If only our 401Ks could grow similarly.

If filling “role holes” from missing people is the main driver in the market, what are those internal technology drivers? There are a number of them:

1. Easy programming, mainly taking the cobot through the steps (and through space);
2. Integrated vision systems have made it easy for robots to recognize and even re-approach a task if things change;
3. A new wide array of end effectors brings new capabilities to industrial areas such as assembly, and robots with screwdriver hands;
4. Sensors that keep a robot or whatever it’s holding at a specified distance from a target, a very useful thing in, say, painting;
5. Ease of insertion into the workplace and integration into workflow; and
6. The ability to interact with its environment, including safely interacting with its flesh-covered “coworkers.”

These are the things driving more robot acceptance, and in fact these are the specific things that fabricators will find irresistible. In the future, robotics market-makers will get creative and instead of filling role holes, the robots in seven or eight years will be very different. They’ll be different in the same way your phone is different from the computer onboard Apollo 11’s lunar module. See the video below for a few cool things on the way in robotics.