Can the new generation of robot enable us to rethink the manufacturing industry?

Back in 2012, the International Federation of Robotics estimates that there were 1.1 million working robots around the world. Machines now do about 80% of all the work involved in the car industry. Unfortunately, in most of the other industries, the volume is too low to make automation worthwhile, or the product line changes too rapidly in response to new demand or innovation. This includes small-scale manufacturing but also relatively advanced industries such as aerospace and cell-phone manufacturing. In fact, most of the electronics manufacturing is still done manually, which is why it has been moved to low-wage economies in Asia.

There seems to be 3 main obstacles that limit us from having a much larger automation of our manufacturing industry. Traditional robots were:

1. Incapable of handling even small deviations in their environment
2. Unsafe to such an extent that they often need to be kept separated from human workers
3. Complicated and expensive to be programed and therefore making them terrible at multi-tasking

Those are the three hurdles Rodney Brooks decided to tackle when he founded his company Rethink Robotics back in 2008. Thankfully for him, Brooks was far from being a rookie. During the 1980s and 1990s, while at MIT, Brooks published work that helped shape the twin fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. Then, in 1990, he cofounded iRobot, a company that introduced robots to new fields of work. It now makes a wide range of domestic and military robots, including the Roomba, a Frisbee-size household vacuum cleaner that has worldwide bestseller. For all these years Brooks thought that the industrial robotic approach had to be rethink from scratch and that we had to make a different sort of robot for the manufacturing industry. Cheap labour could not be the primary factor that drive this industry in the coming decades.

The first result was the release of Baxter in early 2012, which is said to be the very first robot designed to work in “real world” environments. It is unique in a sense that for the very first time, the robot is going to adapt to the environment it is deployed and not the other way around. Hence, for instance, it can pick up items that aren’t precisely aligned or adjust its movement to some moving receiving boxes, just like a human would do.

Also like a regular human worker, Baxter can be taught in minutes to perform a new task. To teach Baxter to recognize something, one just hold the object in front of one of its cameras (in the head, in the chest, and at the end of each arm) and to program an action, you can move one of Baxter’s two arms through the desired motion and select from a number of preprogramed actions. The cost and time of deploying and redeploying the robot was taken down to a marginal level. Such flexibility would be absolutely key in small production lines in order to covert for staff turnovers as well as the ever changing requirements dictated by the customers.

Finally, as far as safety is concerned, Brooks likes to demonstrate his robot’s safety features by putting his head in the way of one of its giant arms as it swings through a task. Baxter moves too slowly and gently to do harm, and an array of sonar sensors positioned around its head can detect human movement. They are also loaded with embedded sensors throughout their joints. The robot reacts to the sudden change in force that occurs with an unexpected impact and responds by stopping instantly.

Since then, thanks to the feedbacks of its early adopters, Rethink Robotics has made some fantastic progresses and was able to release this year their second standardized robot called Sawyer.

Will such machines destroy even more jobs in an already quite damaged industry in our development countries is yet another debate that will be treated in another post. For now, quite frankly, the possibilities offered by such machines are staggering and Rethink Robotics youtube channel is full of customer “success story” videos showing new ways of using these robots.