Businessweek thinks there is one clear winner in the manufacturing world: the $50 Japanese billion company that controls most of the world’s market for factory automation and industrial robotics. “In fact,” writes Businessweek (Oct. 23, 2017), “Fanuc might just be the single most important manufacturing company in the world right now, because everything Fanuc does is designed to make it part of what every other manufacturing company is doing”.
At Fanuc’s Mt. Fuji plant, hundreds of bright yellow Fanuc robots are working around the clock to build other Fanuc robots. Some robots will be shipped elsewhere in Japan, where strict immigration policies and a declining birthrate have left manufacturers of all sizes more dependent on factory automation. But most are bound for China.
Automation has been rising in China over the past decade, partly because, as wages and living standards have risen, workers have proved less willing to perform dangerous, monotonous tasks, and partly because Chinese manufacturers are seeking the same efficiencies as their overseas counterparts. More and more, it’s Fanuc’s industrial robots that assemble and paint automobiles in China, construct complex motors, and make injection-molded parts and electrical components.
And as China goes, so goes the rest of the industrial world. Multinationals that are reshoring operations from Asia to N. America and Europe are doing so in part because automation promises sophisticated production methods and labor savings; they are spending more than ever on industrial robots– 32% more than a year earlier, with many of them are ending up in Midwestern steel and auto manufacturing centers. Orders from the U.S., though, are dwarfed by those from China—some 90,000 units, 1/3 of the world’s total industrial robot orders last year. (Researchers estimate that each new industrial robot displaces 5 human workers).
The key to Fanuc’s success may lie in AI. In the past, the selection of a single part from a bin full of similar parts required skilled programmers to “teach” the robots how to perform the task. Now, Fanuc’s robots are teaching themselves. “After 1,000 attempts, the robot has a success rate of 60%,” the company said. “After 5,000 attempts it can already pick up 90% of all parts—without a single line of program code having to be written.”
Classroom discussion questions:
- What is the role of artificial intelligence in robotics?
- What will be the impact of robotics on U.S. manufacturing?