Industrial automation systems are a lot like coin sorting machines.  You dump your coins into the sorting machine and it uses simple rules (tooling) to separate and organize your coins into quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.  Automation is the same.  Bowlfeeders, part crowding, sieves, robotic vision-guidance, etc. are all really just fancy ways of doing the same thing as a coin sorting machine.  They take random widgets and organize them using tools (hardware or software).  The key is they do it without thinking.

That’s really the question you need to ask yourself when looking at completely automating a process – “Can this process be broken down into a series of steps such that a set of rules can complete it without thinking?”

As much as we think automation and robots are “smart”,  they’re really not.  A robot can’t improvise or handle a new situation it was never designed or programmed to handle.  As technology marches forward, it continues to raise the bar higher and higher by providing more powerful tools, but the overall strategy remains the same.

This strategy means some processes can’t be automated, since they require a person to figure out the anomalies that inevitably come up.  But what if you could semi-automate them?  What if you could remove the laborious, time consuming, non-value added tasks and leave the people to do what they do best, the thinking part?

I’d like to see a new generation of safe, interactive robots that can work with people to perform these tasks. 

A good example where this could fit is putting a gas tank into a car on an automotive assembly line.  The majority of the process, moving the tank from the rack beside the line to the car, is time-consuming, simple and adds no-value to the car itself.  It’s the very final part, where the tank is actually mated with the car, that the person’s brain starts to get used.  That part, is always slightly different and requires thinking. The operator moves fuel lines and wire harnesses out of the way, jiggles the tank into place in order to get the bolts through the holes and threads started, and connects connectors and plugs by wiggling them into place.  It’s this part that makes the process too difficult to completely automated.

If you could introduce a safe, interactive robot into this scenario, the non-value added labor could be eliminated from the process.   A robot could automatically get the tank from the rack, bring it to the car, raise it close to the insertion point, and then track along with the moving car waiting for the operator to help it with the next steps.  An operator, who was working on another value-added task on the car, could then grab a hold of the gripper or the robot arm itself and move the robot and gas tank into place.  Just like two people who work together to lift a heavy object, the robot and person would work together to insert the gas tank.  The difference would be, in this case the robot does most of the lifting and the operator provides enough force to direct and guide it.  Safety scanners or safety mats could be used to determine when the robot and operator are in the same area, and would put the robot into “interactive-safe-mode”.  In this mode, the robot’s torque would be limited such that at the robot could not exert enough force to hurt someone.  The servo motors would provide just enough torque to hold the robot itself up, along with its load.  Any additional force input (from the operator) would be used to guide the robot.

There are other possibilities as well.  In traditional robotic cells, instead of teaching the robot with a pendant, the robot could moved into desired positions by manipulating the arm itself.  This would be easier and more intuitive for people with little robotic experience to work with.  Paths could be taught this way, allowing the operator to move the robot through its the sequence of operations and teach the path points along the way.  Even fault recovery could be easier.  Instead of having to jog a faulted robot out of a tight spot using the pendant (i.e. inside a CNC), the the operator could physically guide the robot arm out.

Currently, in the medical field robots are used to interact with and touch people.  They augment human performance making the doctor’s hand steady or more precise.  They do this in a safe manner such that the patient, doctor and nurses are not endangered.  If this technology exists today in the medical field, then why not apply it in an industrial setting?