There’s a lot a robot can do these days. Lift heavy loads, perform surgery or,
in this case, snip vine tomatoes and grapes at a rapid pace.
Here at Wootzano, a robotics startup in the northeast of the U.K.,
robots are programmed to cut the stems of fruits, from grapes to tomatoes,
and then package them into boxes, much like a human laborer in a food plant would do normally.
The robots can work 24/7, and we call it dark factories,
it can literally be working without human intervention.
In the future, experts say they'll include robots, artificial intelligence
and other smart technologies to enable full automation,
also known as "lights out," or “dark” manufacturing.
No longer are robots the fiction we once obsessed with in movies and literature.
Today, they are widespread and, in factories and warehouses,
they play a vital role in getting our goods assembled and shipped around the world.
Factories today are more advanced than they've ever been, but they're still
far from the potential peak that’s been portrayed in sci-fi genres.
I think we might exceed a one-to-one ratio of humanoid robots to humans.
Companies like e-commerce giant Amazon have led the way in integrating robots
and automation to speed up manual tasks in their warehouses: moving boxes,
picking up pallets, and managing logistics operations.
Where are we at in that kind of big,
grand vision within technology to have completely automated processes?
Complete automation is what we all want to get towards,
we want no human beings and the whole thing being run autonomously.
Still, the “holy grail” of manufacturing, fully automated factories that can
operate without a single human operator in sight, is something that many industrial
and technology companies are still striving to achieve.
In 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk overhauled the company’s production strategy.
The electric car maker’s new goal? To remove every human operator
and only stop when the factory looked like an alien spaceship.
But the road to total automation hasn’t been smooth.
In a 2018 tweet, Musk admitted that
excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake, and that humans are underrated.
The network of robots in Tesla’s factory became too complex, and ultimately,
they couldn’t churn out enough products at the rate that Musk was pushing for.
When you think of factories, you probably end up picturing scenes like this.
Huge warehouse-like buildings with people sorting or building products on assembly lines.
That was true during the industrial revolution.
Factories were built in a systematic approach, with workers assigned specific tasks.
Fast forward to today and, through the advancement of machines,
that original model now includes connected robots that can operate much faster than people.
Some technologists say the number of roles and responsibilities for humans will be greatly reduced.
Machines would operate autonomously while intelligent sensors could identify
and address issues that come up during the manufacturing process.
Several companies have already taken steps towards “lights-out” manufacturing.
Japanese robotics giant Fanuc was operating a lights-out factory as early as 2001,
with its robots producing other robots at a rate of 50 per 24 hours, far greater than what’s possible with humans.
In the Netherlands, Philips has been relying on lights-out manufacturing
to make its electric razors for years.
The company has 128 robots in its factory working to produce
as many as 15 million shavers per year.
Factories in the future will be much more automated than they currently are, if not autonomous.
Our manufacturing needs to get much more productive; to actually make the promise
of net zero and sustainable practices work, we need to save on costs.
The levels of automation vary across the world.
Manufacturing juggernaut Germany has 397 robots for every 10,000 factory-line workers.
In 2022, China leapfrogged the U.S. in robot density, with 322 units, while the U.S. had 274.
Topping the list when it comes to adoption of robots, though, is South Korea,
which has a whopping 1,000 robots installed per 10,000 employees: a 10th of the industrial workforce.
This automation is especially concentrated in the automotive industry.
In Germany, there are 1,500 robots for every 10,000 employees.
This places the country as the second highest in robot density within the auto space, just behind South Korea.
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of robots as companies realized
that machines couldn’t get sick or spread disease.
This, coupled with historically high wages, and rising costs,
made automation a more attractive proposition to employers.
But, what are the consequences for workers?
An estimated 83 million jobs will be lost over the next five years,
with AI expected to play a key role.
The World Economic Forum says that 69 million new jobs will be added over the period, which would be a net loss
of 14 million jobs.
Still, though, the pace of automation in businesses has slowed compared with what was predicted.
An estimated 34% of all business-related tasks today are performed by machines, up just 1% from 2020.
Still, experts say they don’t expect robots to take over every job in the factory.
The hope is that it will lead to higher-paid roles that are more fulfilling and provide a better quality of life.
The way we see this whole situation is that the robotic systems are actually filling in roles.
The labor pool you need to actually perform the job is not enough at all.
We are in a critical status right now, we don't have people to do the job.
The job profiles and the skills required will dramatically change and therefore,
investment in skills and especially in technological skills is required.
If you look at the competitiveness of Europe as well as North America,
we need to be much more productive than the competition.
Europe is facing structural challenges in its economy, particularly its aging population.
Demographically, Europe is the oldest continent in the world.
The number of working age people in Europe is expected to drop from 285.5 million in 2022,
down to 228.1 million by 2,100.
This threatens to worsen already severe labor shortages in the region.
It might not be a matter of being taken over by robots, but rather working together with them.
Helge Wundermann from the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at University College London
explained how robots can assist humans in a range of tasks.
I think these robots become significantly important
when it comes to tasks where a human requires a third hand, for example soldering,
and the robot is then placing this part that you are soldering so that the human, for example,
doesn’t need to drop down the soldering iron and so on but can continue the task in the most optimal way.
The robots of the future will be free to exist in the same environment as their human counterparts,
with manual workers working alongside robots rather than being replaced by them.
These robots are what we call it collaborative robots. They're supposed to also work with human beings around.
They're very friendly; they've got safety features in-built,
which means human beings can stand right next to the robot and work if they need to be.
The team at UCL is working on a new generation of collaborative robots, or “cobots,”
which use a soft silicon or fabric type of material to make them safer and more flexible.
The aim really here is to reduce significantly the amount of hard materials and move towards soft materials.
So you can see, you can squeeze this and we have in here two empty cavities
in these silicon chambers that can be actuated using pneumatic air pressure.
Although manufacturers are turning to robots for efficiency gains,
humans will still play a role in key areas around creative thinking and problem solving.
If an error is happening, we don’t have enough data possibly to understand,
using machine learning techniques, to then solve the problem.
So the creativity, the experience, the expertise of a human being to troubleshoot some of the problems is essential.
To address this data visibility problem, several manufacturers are spending big bucks on “digital twins”
3D digital replicas of objects in the physical world that allows simulation, testing and understanding
of complex issues without disrupting actual operations.
At Dexory, a supply chain monitoring startup in the U.K.,
engineers are deploying digital twins of entire warehouses so that firms like
Danish shipping giant Maersk can map out their entire inventory.
We have something that's called DexoryView, which is a digital twin platform for the logistics industry,
specifically for warehousing, that gives us the opportunity to gather real-time data.
Dexory uses autonomous robots in its warehouses that can extend to become 41 feet tall.
They can scan 15,000 pallets and parcels an hour, compared to just 240 per hour for humans.
So the robot is fully autonomous; the robot doesn't require any assistance for anybody.
The robot now is going to go to the first point in the mission.
As it gets there, it’s going to raise the tower, turn on the lights, and then we will see the data flowing in real-time.
Smarter factories could also spell good news for the climate.
Robots are becoming more and more precise, meaning less waste,
and energy efficient, meaning less power consumed.
Plus, fewer workers could reduce the need for lighting, heating and cooling systems, resulting in more sustainable operations.
Will there ever be a truly autonomous factory? The auto industry is closer than most,
with many processes now fully automated.
But there are still plenty of tasks that will require a human touch.
Those roles with effectively low paid, in relatively insecure jobs, taking those jobs and actually taking them to be more secure
and more skillful means higher quality of life, and much better performance and happiness of the workers themselves.