Page 47 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

REVOLUTIONIZING INDUSTRY 27

The buyers of robotics wanted economic justification. So we studied
6 plants of Chrysler and 5 plants of Ford and 20 plants in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. Out of that we built a spec. We said, “if we could build a
device to meet this spec it would have broad utility in various jobs in
industry.” The hard fight was to convince someone to put the money up.
We finally got financing, and finally got our first installation in 1961,
which was a General Motors plant in Turnstedt, New Jersey. It served
very well for many years and is now in the Smithsonian as the first indus-
trial robot. From there it’s been a long fight to convince people.

Industrial Robots Today

Today’s industrial robots undertake a wider variety of jobs for
which they are more efficient and less costly than human workers.
Common applications include materials handling (moving parts
from one assembly station to another), spot welding, and paint-
ing. In 2003 alone, manufacturing companies in the United States
bought about $877 million worth of industrial robots—a 19 percent
increase over the previous year’s total. The automobile industry is
still the leading user of robots, purchasing about two-thirds of the
units sold in 2003.
While even Unimate’s successors have little in the way of true
artificial intelligence, they are more flexible and versatile than their
predecessors. For example, a robot called C-Flex can identify differ-
ent models of cars and perform different types of welding operations
depending on which vehicle is passing on the assembly line.
Robots working in lighter industrial settings include machines
that use their vision system to identify the tops and bottoms of Oreo
cookies on the assembly line and then match them together at rates
of up to 2,000 cookies per minute. (No human could do this job so
quickly, and probably no human would want such a job.)
As the costs of human labor (including such expenses as health
insurance) continue to rise, it seems likely that industrial robots
will find their way into many more applications in coming decades.
McDonald’s has already tested a robotic burger-flipping machine.
Some libraries have reconfigured their shelving so robot pages can
fetch books on demand.