Tag: Fanuc

OM in the News: Robots Pick Up More Work at Busy Factories

“Robots are turning up on more factory floors and assembly lines as companies struggle to hire enough workers to fill rising orders,” writes The Wall Street Journal (June 2, 2022). Orders for workplace robots in the U.S. climbed 22% last year to $1.6 billion.

Rising wages and worker shortages, compounded by increases in Covid-19-related absenteeism, are changing some manufacturers’ attitudes about robotics. “Before, you could throw people at a problem instead of finding a more elegant solution,” said the CEO of Delphon Industries. Delphon lost 40% of its production days during January when the coronavirus spread through its workforce. The disruption accelerated the company’s purchase of 3 additional robots earlier this year.

Athena Manufacturing purchased seven robots in the past 18 months.

Manufacturers in the U.S., where workers typically have been abundant and wages stable, have been slower to embrace robotics than those in some other industrialized countries. The number of robots deployed in the U.S. per 10,000 workers has traditionally trailed countries such as South Korea, Japan and Germany. (The use of industrial robots in North America for years had been concentrated in the automotive industry, where robots took on repetitive tasks such as welding on assembly lines.)

Now,  robots are making inroads into other sectors including food production, consumer products and pharmaceuticals. Improved capabilities are allowing robots to be programmed for more-complex tasks requiring a mixture of strength and nimbleness.

At Athena Manufacturing, a fabricating and machining company for metal equipment, customers have been ramping up orders, but Athena has struggled to find enough workers to staff a second weekday shift and a weekend shift. So it recently spent more than $800,000 on robots, including $225,000 alone for the grinding robot shown in the photo. The investments aimed to increase Athena’s capacity to handle orders, more than lowering costs.

“The robots are becoming easier to use,” said the CEO of Fanuc America, a major supplier of industrial robots. “Companies used to think that automation was too hard or too expensive to implement.” But one MIT prof said factories’ increasing reliance on automation will lead to an oversupply of human labor that will drive down wages in the years ahead, unless other U.S. industries can absorb displaced manufacturing workers.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Will automation destroy a lot of manufacturing jobs in the U.S?
  2. Why are robots becoming more popular in recent years?

OM in the News: Is Fanuc the Most Important Manufacturing Company in the World?

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:

  1. What is the role of artificial intelligence in robotics?
  2. What will be the impact of robotics on U.S. manufacturing?

OM in the News: The Latest Robots Take Hold–Deftly

German Chancellor Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Modi with the new YuMi robot
German Chancellor Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Modi with the new YuMi robot

A new generation of robots designed to work safely alongside people and take on tasks such as assembly of small parts that require more dexterity than older robots can muster, is here, reports The Wall Street Journal (April 14, 2015). The Swiss firm ABB just introduced YuMi, which with a starting price of about $40,000, can help assemble such products as smartphones, laptops and tablet computers that have been assembled largely by hand by workers in lower-cost countries like China.

The small robots, called collaborative robots, are more flexible, much easier to program and safer for humans. Older types of robots, designed to do such tasks as weld or hoist heavy objects, are so fast and powerful that they need to be surrounded by fences to avoid injuring workers. The newer robots have sensors and cameras, telling them to slow down or halt when people get too near. They can be used for quality inspections and packaging.“We have taken the robot out of the cage,” said ABB’s CEO.  YuMi is dexterous enough to thread a needle, he added.

YuMi is designed to work with small parts weighing as much as 1.1 pounds. German robot maker, Fanuc, by contrast, has built the CR35iA, which can pick up items weighing as much as 77 pounds. That new robot is expected to be used for such things as stacking boxes on pallets, moving materials into place for assembly, and driving in screws. Many repetitive tasks in factories are still done by people because they require a delicate sense of touch and dexterity that eludes most machines. Robot makers say they are making progress toward matching human dexterity, though. The German Kuka LBR iiwa robot, for instance,  can install a tube inside a dishwasher.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why is this new generation of collaborative robots important to operations managers?

2. What is the restriction that older and larger robots face?