China building first fully robotic factory.
By Jim Stone
They are calling it a breakthrough. But what about Ford, Toyota and others that did this over 20 years ago? How about this - I have been to many places and seen many things. One of the most surprising things I saw was in a very small business that custom built electronic circuits for special applications. They had a robot that built these circuits, and they were complex circuits with hundreds of different components. The robot had cameras for eyes, precision stepper motors for its movements, a hand which amounted to an index finger and a thumb, and it was able to completely assemble, FROM SCRATCH, approximately 3 circuit boards an hour, complete with all electrolytic capacitors and diodes facing the correct direction, all integrated circuits properly soldered in place, EVERYTHING DONE on very complicated circuits and could be left alone to work by itself all night.
The man who owned the business had the comment: When you look at it working, it seems slow. But it does at least do one every 20 minutes, which is as fast as any skilled person and I can leave it running all night and it will have 50 done when I get back, and it does not screw up. It does not need to be baby sat.
He then showed me how all it did was run a software program that had the circuit perfectly mapped out and precision did the rest, but it had to be set up properly to begin with. For example - if you put the wrong parts in the wrong slot for it to grab from, it would install them in the wrong place so you had to set it all up perfect, but once you did it was an automatic machine function after that. What was really most interesting however is that it could look at the job and compare the result to what it had in memory and if anything was not correct it would know it and stop. But it could not fix what was wrong and make things work if initial setup was not done right. Additionally (and amazing) is if something odd happened (such as a stepper motor somehow missing a step, which messed up the hand orientation) the camera would give good enough reference to have the robot automatically correct the error and keep going. So it was not totally stupid either.
This was 10 years ago, robots have been excellent for a long time if all they have to cope with is one little circuit board a foot or less across or a few welds on an auto body, or any perfectly predictable assembly setup that takes no thinking, only correction when orientation is a little off.
This robot factory in China, which is being hailed as a breakthrough is not any sort of breakthrough, America has been doing this for decades and with 200 employees still needed in this Chinese factory "all robot" is a false claim. Most people do not realize just how advanced robotic manufacturing really is, I can't think of an assembly job more complex than an electronic circuit, if robots have been doing that without supervision for over a decade they can do any factory job there is.
What about Asimo - the robot that can handle random? Asimo is a humanoid robot made by Honda that can walk in crowds of people without bumping into anyone, can do random, (such as kick a soccer ball to President Obama) and can operate in a fully three dimensional environment without screwing anything up. That is actually an advanced robot and despite the fact that it is still bad at handling truly random, Asimo is worlds ahead of any assembly robot. Asimo is one step short of Chappie, and though Chappie is fictional robots are a lot farther along than most people realize.
LINKS:
http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/building-work-starts-first-all-robot-manufacturing-plant-chinas
https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=GNFIVbjzDMbBgATPjIC4BQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=asimo
https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=GNFIVbjzDMbBgATPjIC4BQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=chappie
By Jim Stone
They are calling it a breakthrough. But what about Ford, Toyota and others that did this over 20 years ago? How about this - I have been to many places and seen many things. One of the most surprising things I saw was in a very small business that custom built electronic circuits for special applications. They had a robot that built these circuits, and they were complex circuits with hundreds of different components. The robot had cameras for eyes, precision stepper motors for its movements, a hand which amounted to an index finger and a thumb, and it was able to completely assemble, FROM SCRATCH, approximately 3 circuit boards an hour, complete with all electrolytic capacitors and diodes facing the correct direction, all integrated circuits properly soldered in place, EVERYTHING DONE on very complicated circuits and could be left alone to work by itself all night.
The man who owned the business had the comment: When you look at it working, it seems slow. But it does at least do one every 20 minutes, which is as fast as any skilled person and I can leave it running all night and it will have 50 done when I get back, and it does not screw up. It does not need to be baby sat.
He then showed me how all it did was run a software program that had the circuit perfectly mapped out and precision did the rest, but it had to be set up properly to begin with. For example - if you put the wrong parts in the wrong slot for it to grab from, it would install them in the wrong place so you had to set it all up perfect, but once you did it was an automatic machine function after that. What was really most interesting however is that it could look at the job and compare the result to what it had in memory and if anything was not correct it would know it and stop. But it could not fix what was wrong and make things work if initial setup was not done right. Additionally (and amazing) is if something odd happened (such as a stepper motor somehow missing a step, which messed up the hand orientation) the camera would give good enough reference to have the robot automatically correct the error and keep going. So it was not totally stupid either.
This was 10 years ago, robots have been excellent for a long time if all they have to cope with is one little circuit board a foot or less across or a few welds on an auto body, or any perfectly predictable assembly setup that takes no thinking, only correction when orientation is a little off.
This robot factory in China, which is being hailed as a breakthrough is not any sort of breakthrough, America has been doing this for decades and with 200 employees still needed in this Chinese factory "all robot" is a false claim. Most people do not realize just how advanced robotic manufacturing really is, I can't think of an assembly job more complex than an electronic circuit, if robots have been doing that without supervision for over a decade they can do any factory job there is.
What about Asimo - the robot that can handle random? Asimo is a humanoid robot made by Honda that can walk in crowds of people without bumping into anyone, can do random, (such as kick a soccer ball to President Obama) and can operate in a fully three dimensional environment without screwing anything up. That is actually an advanced robot and despite the fact that it is still bad at handling truly random, Asimo is worlds ahead of any assembly robot. Asimo is one step short of Chappie, and though Chappie is fictional robots are a lot farther along than most people realize.
LINKS:
http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/building-work-starts-first-all-robot-manufacturing-plant-chinas
https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=GNFIVbjzDMbBgATPjIC4BQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=asimo
https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=GNFIVbjzDMbBgATPjIC4BQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=chappie