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1.4 A Brief History of Robotics
few costly collisions would usually led to the AGV’s removal. If the AGV
did have range sensors, it would stop for anything. A well placed lunch box
could hold the AGV for hours until a manager happened to notice what was
going on. Even better from a disgruntled worker’s perspective, many AGVs
would make a loud noise to indicate the path was blocked. Imagine having
to constantly remove lunch boxes from the path of a dumb machine making
unpleasant siren noises.
From the first, robots in the workplace triggered a backlash. Many of the
human workers felt threatened by a potential loss of jobs, even though the
jobs being mechanized were often menial or dangerous. This was particu-
larly true of manufacturing facilities which were unionized. One engineer
reported that on the first day it was used in a hospital, a HelpMate Robotics
cart was discovered pushed down the stairs. Future models were modified
to have some mechanisms to prevent malicious acts.
Despite the emerging Luddite effect, industrial engineers in each of the
BLACK FACTORY economic powers began working for a black factory in the 1980’s. A black fac-
tory is a factory that has no lights turned on because there are no workers.
Computers and robots were expected to allow complete automation of man-
ufacturing processes, and courses in “Computer-Integrated Manufacturing
Systems” became popular in engineering schools.
But two unanticipated trends undermined industrial robots in a way that
the Luddite movement could not. First, industrial engineers did not have
experience designing manufacturing plants with robots. Often industrial
manipulators were applied to the wrong application. One of the most em-
barrassing examples was the IBM Lexington printer plant. The plant was
built with a high degree of automation, and the designers wrote numerous
articles on the exotic robot technology they had cleverly designed. Unfortu-
nately, IBM had grossly over-estimated the market for printers and the plant
sat mostly idle at a loss. While the plant’s failure wasn’t the fault of robotics,
per se, it did cause many manufacturers to have a negative view of automa-
tion in general. The second trend was the changing world economy. Cus-
tomers were demanding “mass customization.” Manufacturers who could
make short runs of a product tailored to each customer on a large scale were
the ones making the money. (Mass customization is also referred to as “agile
manufacturing.”) However, the lack of adaptability and difficulties in pro-
gramming industrial robot arms and changing the paths of AGVs interfered
with rapid retooling. The lack of adaptability, combined with concerns over
worker safety and the Luddite effect, served to discourage companies from
investing in robots through most of the 1990’s.