Robots are a man's best friend?

Citation

Loughlin, C. (1999), "Robots are a man's best friend?", Industrial Robot, Vol. 26 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.1999.04926eaa.001

Robots are a man's best friend?

Robots are a man's best friend?

When William Henry Hoover started to market the vacuum cleaner (invented in 1901 by Scotsman Hubert Cecil Booth) it was first advertised with a poster showing a terrified scullery maid being chased by a "Hoover" and advocating that it would dispense with the need for servants.

When this first sales drive failed the poster was replaced by one showing the Hoover as the servant's best friend, instantly improving the lot of our now sedated scullery maid. The rest is history.

This issue looks at the use of robots in the automotive industry and as with the Hoover it is very apparent that the new emphasis is on robots, and other advanced technology, working alongside people rather than replacing them. Our feature on the Japanese automotive industry (Kusuda) shows the importance of establishing a contented workforce and the article on Cobots (Peshkin and Colgate) describes a very promising area of development that will open up whole new areas for robot application.

This is not to say that our present lines of robots spot welding body-in-white, with not a person in sight, will be done away with (see "Rover 75 sets new standards.."). These robots are doing dangerous, heavy work and people are better off without it. However, the future is shaping up to have people using robots much as we do Hoovers. Our best friends that take the hard work and drudgery out of our labours while leaving us with the dignity associated with a valuable contribution to the man/machine partnership.

I foresee a great future for Cobots both in the forms described in this issue and in many others yet to be considered. Whether these are intelligent power tools or service robots helping us to the bathroom, I consider that the future will be a lot more pleasant and productive if robots are designed to help us rather than replace us.

One of the main principles behind Cobots is that they help prevent humans from making mistakes. They combine the intelligence and dexterity of the person with the absolute positioning knowledge (and sometimes power) of the robot. This Cobot theme is also exploited to some extent by our Research Article on shipbuilding (Ang et al.). In this the flexibility and intelligence of the human operator are used to make a process commercially viable where full automation from CAD modelling would be both too expensive and too impractical, and also where fully manual procedures are too slow and subject to variable quality.

By reconsidering this man/machine partnership whole new areas of robot application can be opened up and the result can be win, win, win for our scullery maid, mistress of the household and Hoover manufacturer.

Clive Loughlin