ROBOTS EVERYWHERE OUR ONE-ARMED FRIENDS IN THE FACTORY ARE NO LONGER ALONE Glenn Johnson, Editor
Robots are no longer a feature only of manufacturing plants — they are moving into our everyday lives and are getting ready to make a dramatic impact.
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s automation engineering professionals, most of the readers of this publication are familiar with robots and their application in industries such as manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and food and beverage. And of course the latest advancements have been mainly in the area of collaborative robots (or cobots) that can work safely alongside and assist human skilled workers. While the heavy and powerful (and relatively dumb) industrial robot arm that has been evolving slowly since the 1960s will continue to be used in the near future — doing the heavy lifting and repetitive drudgery — it will be interesting to see how knowledge gleaned from the development of cobots will alter even these familiar workers. A cobot that can pack a pallet safely without safety fencing? Not sure about that one… after all, there are other dangers than just the robot in that situation. But as we are all well aware, robotics is nowadays no longer just the domain of the industrial automation industry. Other industries are heavily investing in robotics research, and in many cases their research is arriving at practical and realistic possibilities. The robots envisaged in science fiction in the 20th century are beginning to look like distinct possibilities in our present generations. Automation engineers will no longer be the only people who work with robots —
20 WHAT'S NEW IN PROCESS TECHNOLOGY - NOVEMBER 2016
they will be in our daily lives and many other areas of life and the economy as well. I have noticed that the level of awareness of these developments in the broader society is quite variable. While the geeks and engineers of the world may be well interested in the progress of robotics, many in the general public seem to be quite unaware — and I suspect unprepared for the changes to come. Recently in a conversation with my younger brother I mentioned that we would have driverless cars on our roads very soon, but he didn’t believe me. “Not in my lifetime” were his actual words. He thought that bureaucracy would slow it down, and I tried to explain to him that the technology is no longer new, that it is in the final stages of refinement, and that we are already at the ‘pointy end’ of bureaucratic decision-making about allowing driverless cars. Only weeks later Singapore announced its driverless taxi trial1 and now Uber is doing the same in the US. Needless to say, some people might be in for a bit of a shock. In this article I’d like to present a broader overview of how our friends the robots are beginning to make inroads into our lives, whether we are aware of it or not. And the key concept is autonomy.
What we have now So far, industrial robots do not act autonomously — they do repetitive tasks as they are taught to do them — but they nevertheless
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