When the revolution comes

Citation

Loughlin, C. (2006), "When the revolution comes", Industrial Robot, Vol. 33 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2006.04933eaa.001

When the revolution comes

When the revolution comes

You need look no further than our RIA news story on the 30 per cent fall in First Quarter 2006 robot sales in North America to see just how vulnerable the robotics industry is to fluctuations in the automotive market. Part of this relative fall is no doubt due the exceptionally good sales the previous year, but is must still create a difficult environment for robot manufacturers.

This underlines the increasingly urgent need for application diversification that is expressed so authoritatively by Mike Wilson in this issue's Viewpoint and with which I whole heartedly concur.

Robot prices are already very low and so the scope for lowering them still further and thereby hopefully attracting new sales is hardly worth considering. So if we cannot make them cost less the next consideration is that we need them to do more.

They are already much faster and more precise than people can possibly manage and yet factories employ far more people than robots. In fact about 30 times as many, and that is in Japan which itself employs about three times as many robots per 10,000 people as typical industrialised nations (Source: IFR).

The way forward is, therefore, to give our robots additional capabilities in the form of new and improved sensing – predominantly vision and also, more controversially, improved grippers.

Most of this new technology already exists so it is not a matter of fundamental research so much as mental attitude. The robots industry is now well established – which is another way of saying it has matured – or alternatively that it has become stuck in its ways. If you compare a robot manufacturer's shiny new catalogue with one printed ten years ago you may struggle to see any differences. Of course everything has improved but these have been in the main incremental as opposed to revolutionary changes. A bit like the automotive industry itself.

In May earlier this year I attended the International Symposium on Robotics in Munich. This is one of my favourite conferences, partly because it was the first one I ever presented a paper at and also because it tends to be more industrially relevant than others I could mention. Despite this I did not see many engineers from robotics companies in the audience, which is a great shame.

What we need is for the robot manufacturers to make themselves aware of what technology can now offer and have the resolve to create new application solutions. The robot companies will probably argue with this and say it is the job of systems houses and that theirs is just to make robots – and “by the way we tried this 20 years ago and got burned”. But I consider that these old fashioned attitudes need to be cast aside and it is only by the robot companies fully embracing the need for change and being prepared to take risks, that real progress will be made.

When the revolution comes who will be first to have their backs against the wall? Or do we first need to kill off entrenched practices to make the revolution happen at all?

Clive Loughlin