For decades, robotics was expected to widely replace human labour and manufacturing. It may finally be coming true.
Episode Summary:
The first industrial robot debuted in a GM plant in 1961 and since then, the auto industry has been assumed to be the leader in robotics for production. Today, use is more widespread, but today, America lags in widespread adoption. Jim Anderton speculates on the reasons.
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Transcript of this week’s show:
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We’ve all seen the videos of industrial robots assembling cars and auto plants. Large machines, dropping large stampings into fixtures and robotically resistance welding stampings into bodies in white, sparks flying. Now that’s a classic application for several reasons. For auto assemblers, robotics can handle large assemblies, and spot weld them together with a high degree of repeatability. For workers, fixturing and welding large-stamped panels was and sometimes still is difficult, dangerous and boring work.
Take a look at the Statista chart. For the latest full year worldwide status, 2020, electronics industry led the world in industrial robot installation with 109,000 machines delivered worldwide. The auto industry is in fact in third place with 80,000 units shipped. We know that robots make you sense in auto assembly, but electronics? Well, the reason why is more than just assembly of consumer electronics and handheld devices, surprising amount of which is still done by hand.
A major part of it is because of the way circuits are built today. It’s called surface mount technology (SMT), and it uses very small discrete electronic components and integrated circuits that are reflow soldered on the surface of phenolic printed circuit boards, usually on both sides. This technology replaced the older through hole technique where components with leads or pins were inserted through perforations and were then wave soldered to cover clad tracks on the backside of the board. SMT is lighter and allows far greater component density, but the real breakthrough offered by it was the ability to use pick and place robotics to stuff the boards.
This Essemtec pick and place unit uses 8 heads and can place as many as 20,000 components per hour. Unlike the automotive example, this technology doesn’t replace human labour 1 for 1, but it represents the only cost-effective way to mass-produce high-volume electronics today. Modern electronics are designed for robotic assembly and can’t be mass-produced any other way. PCBs in mass produced electronic devices are by nature small, and that makes this industry natural for this kind of automation, but I expect that were going to see something like this appear in everything from the automotive industry to order packing my major fulfilment centres, especially with majors like Amazon.
But to make this change, the factories and warehouses themselves, as well as the production processes, left to be redesigned to accommodate the machines, rather than people. Those operations will not be collaborative. The only role for human beings will be to inspect and service the robots, and don’t expect that to happen often. As political and supply chain pressures mount to re-shore manufacturing from Asia to America, there is a brief window of opportunity post Covid to design new, local production systems that are highly automated from the start, neatly working around the supply chain problem and the current shortage of skilled labour. The jobs that are created to support the automation, will be skilled, and well paid.
But what’s to stop the China or the Korean or India from adopting this same technology? Well, nothing, which is the point. The clock is ticking, and this kind of industrial transformation will take capital, a lot of it, and it seems to me that this would be a natural place to direct a major Biden administration infrastructure policy. Bridges and roads are important, but the fact is, robots are more important.
