Once a luxury reserved for big manufacturers, smaller, smarter, more flexible and less expensive “cobots”—collaborative robots—are bringing automation to every fabricator, no matter the size. The slow, fragile recovery of American goods production wouldn’t be possible without them, writes The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 11-12, 2025).
The number of U.S. companies that make physical things reached a low point in 2014 and has grown since then. Yet they are trapped in a never-ending labor shortage as skilled workers age out, and young people fail to take their place.
China has become the de facto manufacturer of the world’s goods, owing not only to its enormous population of engineers, technicians and machinists but also its 2-million-plus army of industrial robots. Now the U.S. is attempting to claw back some of those contracts—called “reshoring”—and robots can in some cases quadruple worker output.
The push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., and the demand for industrial goods to power America’s AI-fueled economy, are driving automation adoption and innovation. “Automation is key to reshoring, plain and simple,” says one CEO.
Cobots have become radically easier to program over the past decade, and now people can use a simple tablet interface to instruct them to perform specific sequences of actions. Programming the older robots common in automotive factories since the 1960s took years of training.
Cobots are part of a broader trend in robotics: Specialized robots that use sensors to safely navigate human environments. They can cope with more variability than previous industrial robots, which had no sensing abilities. This has been essential to the rise of Amazon and its superfast fulfillment, and now it’s coming to manufacturing.
China is indisputably the leader in high-volume manufacturing, and companies that want the biggest volumes of manufactured parts for the lowest possible price continue to send work there. And though many U.S. manufacturers can’t match their Chinese peers in volume, they are competing by using automation to tackle smaller batches of goods under tight deadlines. Manufacturers in the U.S. are now asking how to reshore the making of critical parts.
Classroom discussion questions:
- What is a “cobot” and how does it differ from a robot?
- Why has China become such a powerful manufacturing hub?