Robots’ Industrial Popularity Rising
According to a joke going around Detroit, for what General Motors spent on auto-making robots at Cadillac, “it could have bought Toyota.”
That said, it is only fair to say that 1996 was a banner year for U.S. robot makers, as employers took their mechanical marvels to heart.
“Robot Renaissance” proclaimed a recent edition of Industry Week magazine.
For the first time, total annual robot sales are verging on $1 billion, the Robotic Industries Assn. of Ann Arbor, Mich., reports. The U.S. robot population is up 64% since 1992, from 44,000 to 69,000.
“There was a [sales] downturn in the ‘80s because the applications people were using robots for were far too difficult,” said association Executive Vice President Don Vincent. “It required dexterity and sensing, and human hands do better than any robot hands.”
“We are no longer looking at robots as the panacea,” said John Teresko, senior technology editor at Industry Week in Cleveland. “We have matured to the point where there are jobs that only robots can do and this is an important watershed in their application.”
“In repetitive work, the robot is superior,” said Frederick Herzberg of Salt Lake City, an automation guru who recently retired as a management professor at the University of Utah.
“But in terms of the overall product, the human being is superior,” Herzberg continued. “A robot will not see that a different-size bolt would be superior, just as a doctor who examines a patient is superior to one who just administers a shot.”
Accordingly, makers of pharmaceuticals, textiles, food and furniture increasingly summon robots for routine and hazardous jobs, with “automotive still the biggest user,” said Ann Smith, market research manager at robot maker ABB Flexible Automation in New Berlin, Wis. “General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are putting in new robots and Harley-Davidson is using them for machine tending.”
“You’re getting people out of very dirty and dangerous jobs such as spraying toxic materials or loading a forging press in a foundry,” Smith added.
“Dumb robots . . . are selling like hot cakes,” confirmed Avi Kak, of Purdue University’s Robot Vision Laboratory in Lafayette, Ind.
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With robots on the march, flesh-and-blood folks may well ask, “What about our jobs?” In dramatist Karl Capek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” the mechanical “forced laborers” (from the Czech word “robota”) take over the world.
Not to worry--just yet. Manufacturing professor Joe Thomas of Cornell University noted that humans even won a round against the modern-day robots. He noted that one Japanese auto maker reverted to people at some robotocized work stations “because the individual can look at the [industrial] process and think about ways to improve it.”
Still, Purdue’s Kak predicted, “As computers become more powerful at an amazing pace, in the near future sensor-based robots will become a reality and more manufacturing jobs will be automated.”
Frank Emspak, a continuing education professor at the University of Wisconsin Extension’s School for Workers, pointed out that robots are suited for work in only about 10% to 20% of U.S. plants.
“We’d probably be better off investing in [human] skills to make the manufacturing process skills-dependent rather than machine-dependent,” thus saving jobs and, often, dollars, he said.
When the industry that makes cabinets for lawyers’ offices and gambling casinos pondered replacing carpenters with robots, it had to weigh the high cost of robot sensors, Emspak said.
“They felt they would be shooting themselves in the foot and dumped the robot idea. They said, ‘We’ll lose the skills, and the ability to innovate and do one-of-a-kind architectural work,’ ” he said.
“As you move toward machine-based technology, you move toward inflexibility,” Emspak added.
Aware of such limitations, designers are striving to improve robots’ visual and manual performance. At one Japanese plant, they’ve even endowed them with musical talent. To alert workers of their approach, robots tootle Stephen Foster melodies.
