cross-posted from: https://futurology.today/post/4251786
Bringing manufacturing jobs home has been in the news lately, but it’s not the 1950s or even the 1980s anymore. Today’s factories need far less humans. Global car sales were 78,000,000 in 2024 and the global automotive workforce was 2,500,000. However, if the global workforce was as efficient as this Honda factory, it could build those cars with only 20% of that workforce.
If something can be done for 20% of the cost, that is probably the direction of travel. Bear in mind too, factories will get even more automated and efficient than today’s 2025 Honda factory.
It’s not improbable within a few years we will have 100% robot-staffed factories that need no humans at all. Who’ll have the money to buy all the cars they make is another question entirely.
Doubtful. The amount of precise manipulation needed to do something as simple as repair the feeder mechanism on a welder, is still decades away, let alone cut and install wiring, or repair a work-cell cage. While some of that is kinda possible, to be able to do it at scale and more cost effective than human labor is well into the realm of fiction, and does not reflect a realistic assessment of the state of future or current capabilities.
[me, talking out of my ass, as always]: they could like build them with a modular design so that if any part of a specific module breaks, rather than require the fine manipulation to actually fix that part, swap it out for a spare while the broken module gets sent off to actually have the damage fixed by people/whatever more specialized process
Yeah, that is theoretically possible. But having spares and modules just lying around are explicitly against the current manufacturing principles that are driving the industry, so it would require an ideological revolution for companies to adopt those ideas, let alone have robots that are manufactured in a way to accommodate that philosophy. Still doesn’t quite solve the whole ‘threading greasy wire’ problem, but modularity would make it easier.
It just means all the delicate specialized repair could be centralized rather than have detailed and time consuming maintenance at the factory but yeah idk im not a roboticist i make a da food
It’s more difficult than just the delicate operations bit.
Well, now you need a way to detach and convey the mechanism to the centralized area, cataloguing where it is, cataloguing that it has arrived, repairing it, cataloging that is has been repaired, conveying it back, and then installing it, and cataloguing that it has been delivered and installed. All possible tech, but is it worth buying the robot just for that?
And if the conveyor robot breaks down, is there another robot to repair the conveyor robot, etc? You have to apply the worst case scenario, because there is a non-zero chance it will happen.
No you don’t need to do all that you just have it hucked in a bin and shipped out to where people or specialized machines do all that
Literally the requirement is having bins big enough for the parts to be thrown into and that can be moved around but at that point you have just have a crane robot convey everything. I guess at some point that might break but at least all the other specialized maintenance and the potential for loss of time in operation as shit gets fixed gets off loaded to the actual repair facility. So you’d just need 1 dude who could fix a crane robot i guess
All you’ve done is define the method of conveyance as ‘bin’ and ‘crane robots’, you still have to catalogue everything, which hey, is how Amazon does their packaging conveyance in their robotic cell warehouses. So we are now in current technological reality, which is great! So is it one bin per part or are there also robots to sort through the bins? I think the former is currently easier than the latter, but the latter could be possible in the coming years. Then we just need to create automation to repair those robots as well, etc. etc.
If we still need one dude to repair the crane robot, or more likely the repair robots, that means we aren’t at 100% automation, which I have been assured, is within our lifetimes, despite the fact that this has been the gap for automation since Oliver Evan made the automated flour mill in 1785. Maybe it will happen, but the odds are significantly against it, even as industry pushes forward.
Idk i don’t think you’re thinking of what i’m describing how i’m describing it
Maybe, maybe not. If you are interested in robotics though, you should look into pursuing it, even at a hobby level. Even Lego kit sets are incredibly useful for understanding this field. Cheers.
If robots can build cars, I’d guess they can manage that.
Building a car on a set-piece line, and recognizing a quality defect, assessing the cause of the defect, and repairing the mechanism that caused the defect are completely different engineering challenges. One is very suited towards robotic adoption, the other is not and will require robotic technologies that do not exist to be applied it ways not yet understood in a cost effective manner that has not been explained.
Robots aren’t magic, they’re programmed to do one thing only. Faults in machines can occur in all sorts of ways a preprogrammed robot arm can’t fix. You need a human to figure it out
Robots are suited to monotonous labour, not judging situations, or more than surface level analysis of errors.
I don’t think it’s necessarily decades away, and in any case decades isn’t even that long - within most of our timespans even.
Yeah, and people have been saying we would have household robots since the 00’s as well, doesn’t make it true. And I say decades because I believe that it could take more than a 100 years at the current scale of adaptation and adoption, assuming consistent innovation, which I do not.
Literally working in the field of manufacturing robotics, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about about.
Six-axis manipulators have not significantly changed since the 00’s, and robots are no closer to being able to recognize fault and repair themselves than they were in the 60’s. LIM’s have made quality control on fast large scale presses easier, but there are still massive problems with integration into larger robotic systems.
If I were to guess, I would say that most of Honda’s efficiency gains have come from being able to run brand new robotics, and running LIM’s on their part presses which are likely far more precise in their abilities, but something that will likely degrade over the next 5 years of running. This will create significant improvements from the competition, along with being able to build a factory from the ground up around these technologies, as well as great application of 5s and lean manufacturing principles, which is something most car companies outside of Tesla haven’t been able to do recently, but rather adapt existing infrastructure to current technologies. As well, Honda, unlike Tesla, is also likely working with statistically proven technologies and not wasting time on massive engineering technology boondoggles, as Tesla is prone towards doing.
It’s cool to see, but I highly encourage people to actually get into manufacturing technologies and robotics to be able to see past the sci-fi goggles and marketing hype to where the state of the tech actually is.
I dunno, all of us non-experts are pretty sure robots will do that soon…
Who are at to believe, someone like you who clearly knows the field, or a known con-man who lied to us about every previous thing they sold us?
(This is sarcasm. I learned something from your posts. Thank you for weighing in on this.)
Thanks. There are still a lot of advancements being made globally, and it is always possible something will come out of the blue and surprise me, but, for now and for my lifetime, humans still are bound to the manufacturing line if we wish to pursue an industrial economy (which is a completely different argument to be had).
That is why my sci-fi prediction of humans being augmented to be more “productive” and turned into tools is totally more real than all the other amateurs!