With just under two weeks to go until Automate 2025 in Detroit, it seems like maturity is coming to the world of robots and automation.
A report on the metal fabrication robot market from Data Horizzon Research (Pune, India) shows that the worldwide market in 2024 was valued at $3.2 billion. It is expected to increase to $8.5 billion by 2033, which results in a CAGR of 11.4% from now until 2033. If we take the current U.S. market share in robots, 12.7%, our numbers look like this: current value of the market is $406 million, moving to $1,073 million—over a billion, assuming no change in U.S. market share.
What are these robots doing at work? A quarter of the installed base is for welding, mostly in automotive applications. In warehouses and consumer package goods companies, much attention is being paid to palletizing, so expect this area to grow.
What about our little corner of the manufacturing industry? In metal fabricating, one big application seems to be machine tending, particularly in bending. There are many robots used in laser cutting too, some of them in part sorting applications, others for material handling inside or outside the machine. (Palletizing is not called for often enough in fabricating for the robot vendors to expend a great deal of effort here.)
You can see numbers all over the web that show the power of automation. AMADA and TRUMPF both report 40-60% time reduction when using a robot with machine vision. In welding, savings can be higher. Lincoln Electric published findings of up to 5 times more welds per shift with robotic welding cells.
Besides increased productivity, other siren calls of robot integration include increased accuracy, increased quality and repeatability, scrap reduction, and lights out, 24/7 production.
Size is a factor in the people equation
So many robot makers, integrators, and fabricators have said the same thing: that the intent is not to replace people, but to apply automation and make the gains while moving the human worker to other, higher tasks such programming several machines.
How is this working out in practice? 2023 research from SME found that 48% of fabricators who deployed robots reassigned workers to skilled programming, QA, or customer support roles rather than being laid off. (But this means 52% did get laid off.) A different study from the same year, done by Deloitte, found that only 21% of manufacturers surveyed had a formal reskilling initiative tied to automation rollout.
Typically, the companies taking steps to reassign workers are the larger firms (Boeing, GE, and medical device firms are good examples).
If a fabricator is short on workers across the board, they are incented to retrain an operator as a robot cell tech or programmer. However, many of the automation innovations are built into the machine tool. Some reside at the same point all the time; those that are movable often are on an anchored track. Built-in robotic systems mean only a little operator intervention, which means a talented operator does not have to switch duties. Instead of operating a single machine, that same person can operate two or three machines concurrently, with the right choreography.
While upskilling seems like the right thing to do, it can be difficult. The operator must have the aptitude, time, and resources, not just enthusiasm and willingness. Even if those criteria are met, workers often face lack of access to retraining programs, low confidence in their ability to learn new digital tools, and nonexistent or unclear incentives.
Some companies simply state that they are not doing layoffs, they re simply not hiring replacements as workers retire. It’s 100% the truth, but the result is still a slower-motion erosion of operator jobs.
Smaller job shops are not as able to purchase robots, or retrain machine operators. There are several reasons for this:
- Upfront costs are better for larger budgets. Even small cobots can run $50K or higher.
- To justify automation (at least today), repeated tasks must be a part of the equation. Smaller companies really have a low-volume, high-mix workload. Compared to their smaller brethren, the large firms have higher volume and can make more gains from automation. Those automated actions are easier to automate at scale.
- Larger firms are more likely to have the staff to engineer a solution, choose the right controls, and implement the IT tactics to support the integration.
- While small firms keep a sharp eye on monthly cash flow, larger firms can look at a robot integration project as a 3- to 5-year payback and not blink an eye.
A 2023 survey by A3 (Ann Arbor, MI) showed that 67% of companies with greater than 100 employees used or planned to adopt robots in the 12 months following the survey. Only 24% of smaller firms (less than 50 employees) had active robotics investments.
That’s not to say that small shops are not progressing, they are just taking a different route. They use robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) firms and plug and play cobots—think of companies like Hirebotics (Nashville, TN) and Universal Robots (Odense, Denmark). Path Robotics (Columbus, OH) is another such vendor who goes to customers large and small.
Small shops will be part of the wave of automation adoption. They will just do it a little more slowly and with less literal ownership from the start.
In the meantime, I will share a report with you after Automate that will bring readers from large and small firms some new and exciting technologies for our next issue.