From excavators to little yellow people, robots and people collaborating

Robot is an old topic, but it is also a hot topic recently. Recently, 36 Krypton has an article depicting the future of home robots, thinking that humanoid and human robots will be the central device for future smart homes.

However, in terms of history and application scale, compared with industrial robots, household robots belong to the newborn. Industrial robots have long been out of the conceptual and laboratory stages and successfully applied to all aspects of manufacturing. In a way, are excavators also counted as industrial robots?

Since last year, China has become the world's largest consumer of industrial robots, the first half of 2014 China's industrial robot imports reached 34714 units, an increase of 92%. The introduction of the introduction of the robot price, equivalent to the replacement of the worker's annual salary multiplied by 1.5 to 5 times times. The price of a substitution machine is about 50,000 to 250,000.

Those with high repeatability and poor environment, such as fuel injection, polishing and so on, are the first places that robots enter ... A new generation of workers at least 9 years of compulsory education, only one child, they would rather 3000 yuan to office work, also do not want to 4000 yuan wages to the factory.

At the end of Tencent's article, citing the view of a worker Liao Yuchan, he said he "prefers liberation and freedom, even listening to music and working in a factory." "On this issue, the woman and the two co-founder of Google agreed." Brin and Page talked about the problem the last time they were on the same stage.

"People's workload will be greatly reduced, maybe only 1% now," Page said. It seems that the employment rate has decreased. Richard Branson is trying to recruit two part-time employees in the UK instead of a former full-time employee. You just cut down on your working hours.

"In the short term, job opportunities are not going away, just moving from one place to another," Brin said. In the long run, people will have more time to engage in recreational activities and creative work.

But it still makes many people feel less comfortable, and if robots can replace me, why would a factory want to hire a worker who works on a mobile phone?

Because there are always some jobs on the line that robots can't do! In addition to some high-precision technical action robot can not be implemented, the existing process improvement and improvement is not programmed robot can be completed. There is also a need for more technical "blue-collar workers" to maintain and manage the equipment. Therefore, the future of the production line is not the machine to replace people, but robots replace people do low-level repetitive labor, people carry out creative and continuous optimization of labor.

Sir Ridley Scott, director of the palace-level sci-fi film "Silver Wing Killer", said:

"The Japanese are sick of the robot's plot."

On the other hand, Henry Ford, the father of the automobile industry, said:

"I hired a man with two hands. ”

Citing these two words to prove a widely circulated but unable to find the source of the argument, "the Japanese think robots must be humanoid robots, and Americans think that robots as long as they can work." The route of both pragmatism and romanticism in the past is clearly the former's overwhelming advantage, but the latter may play a greater role in the future. The closer you are, the closer you are to creativity.

Along with the pipeline automation from the automobile to the consumer electronic product popularization, the industrial robot form also imperceptibly changes, the industrial robot's form is becoming more nimble, more intimate, the form also is closer to the person. This leads to easy collaboration with people:

The automotive industry has been the largest customer of industrial robots. For a long time, industrial robots must be completely isolated from humans when they work. In order to cope with the huge assembly line of the automobile industry, industrial robots in the past have been large and bulky, like ferocious monsters ... Industrial robots are not recommended to work with people. Because the robot power is very big, the work path has certain uncertainty and the danger.

Because most of the spare parts handled in 3C industry are small and require workers and machines to operate with each other, traditional large-scale industrial robots are no longer suitable. Manufacturers like small and medium sized collaborative robots that are able to get along well with humans and work side by shoulder. The company has launched a collaborative robot called Iiwa this year. It has a precise torque sensor that can stop automatically when colliding with people. The company also exhibited its newest collaborative robot this April. It is no longer coated with the company's trademark bright yellow, but let people feel comfortable and safe tender green, which also let a person can recognize it.

Danish company Universal Robots (hereinafter referred to as you) has been in the Chinese market for nearly 3 years. Your robot has almost all the advantages of the Iiwa of the card company: it does not need fences with the workers, it stops automatically when colliding with people, and people who have no programming experience can use it quickly, and the user can move with a robotic arm to teach it the action.

This shows that both humanoid and human robots in the home domain will become the center of equipment, in the manufacturing industry will become an important force. For the younger generation, operating excavators must be less attractive than working with Astro Boy. If you're an engineer defending Astro Boy and Wally, you can't be cooler. This kind of work scene is becoming a reality, look at the video above, in Amazon's Warehouse, Kiva and "stupid human" are working together. The world's largest logistics storage system is as magical as the staircase in Hogwarts.

In my last visit to Shenzhen, Jianjun, founder of Makeblock, a robotic start-up, said that the most recent outlet for open source hardware was online education, and the next outlet could be industrial automation. If you build a brand new industrial equipment system based on open source hardware, it should be the so-called hardware developers and defenders who work in these robots. Like today's iOS or Android developers, they are playing with their work every day, quickly iterating.

Yes, Dr. Nafario, and a bunch of little yellow people!