Foxconn to deploy 1 million robots - what does it mean?

According to Xinhua, the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will deploy 1 million robots over the next three years to improve efficiency and reduce labor for tasks better suited to a robot. The robots will be used to do traditional industrial robot work such as spraying, welding and assembling.

What does it means to robotics industry?
Engadget suggested that ABB would get the contract to provide the robots, perhaps in partnership with Foxconn itself. More companies will be involved; very little information has been provided thus far. We’ll have to wait and watch. Certainly, this is big news for the robotic manufacturing industry. If for no other reason, Foxconn’s deployment will more than double the world’s industrial robot population. And it will do so outside of the auto industry. Next Big Future blogger Brian Wang says, "This seems to be the start of a renewed push to automation in industry. If other companies in China follow, then we could see ten times or more the number of industrial robots."

Why is manufacturing so important to national politics?

In America, manufacturing has been the engine of growth since the Industrial Revolution, and developing great products a national pride. Manufacturing within one’s own country helps reduce the trade deficit and promotes healthy economic growth through profits, wages and sub-contracts. At present, manufacturing represents 21% of America’s GNP and more important, 50% of exported goods. There is also a security/defense component to sustaining a capable homeland manufacturing resource.

Outsourcing weaponry, technology and high-tech R&D is subject to the whims and events of foreign powers and not under a country’s own control. Many nations understand the necessity for their homeland manufacturing and have initiated stimulus programs to sustain that capability and also to promote the use of new breed of robots to enhance it. American is late to the party with it’s AMP and NRI programs, but has just funded $500 million, $70 million of which is for robotics research relating to co-robotics.

The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) and National Robotics Initiative (NRI) focus on the importance of sustaining a strong homeland manufacturing capability which, in addition to helping offset negative trade balances, enables the manufacture of its own high-priority (military, defense, security, space and highly technical) products. America is just beginning to fund what other countries have been funding, in larger amounts for many years now, Korea in particular.

Is the Foxconn pronouncement a wake up call to America?
In 2009, Harvard Business Review published "Restoring American Competitiveness." Here are a few excerpts:

• Beginning in 2000, the country’s trade balance in high-technology products—historically a bastion of U.S. strength—began to decrease. By 2002, it turned negative for the first time and continued to decline through 2007.

• America has lost or is in the process of losing the knowledge, skilled people, and supplier infrastructure needed to manufacture many of the cutting-edge products it invented.

• Even more worrisome, average real weekly wages have essentially remained flat since 1980, meaning that the U.S. economy has been unable to provide a rising standard of living for the majority of its people.

A recent cover story about “Speedup” in America by Mother Jones magazine provides poignant examples of how this trend has affected American workers.

Yes, there is a growing body of real and alarming evidence proclaiming the need for change – but, with America’s polarized and contentious Congress and fearful populace, nobody appears able to do anything about it. Are robotics and Foxconn the wakeup call? Probably not. It's more likely that the Standard & Poor's credit downgrade from triple A to double got everyone's attention.  It sure was felt in the stock market - and robotic companies fared as well as all the others... they lost significantly, dramatically, and did serious damage to investor confidence and their investment portfolios.

If this explanation from Standard & Poor's isn't a wakeup call, I don't know what is:

We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process. We also believe that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration agreed to this week falls short of the amount that we believe is necessary to stabilize the general government debt burden by the middle of the decade.

How are the industrial robotic companies reformulating to stay competitive?
A new breed of flexible industrial arms is on its way. Almost all major companies in industrial robotics are trying to bring to market a similar kind of robot to cater to the needs of new-age manufacturing. Traditional companies like ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa Motoman and Fanuc are trying to bring their robots out of their cages in a step by step manner of evolution, while new entrants and researchers are trying to build entirely new kinds of revolutionary devices.

ABB's FRIDA two-armed robots, from the ABB website

The evolutionary robots are the 1-2-3 armed robots which have evolved from their older versions. These robots are highly suitable for large scale fixed factory-line processes. They have high precision but less flexibility to be a co-worker and need a lot of evolutionary steps to be able to accomodate medium scale dynamic environments.

Courtesy iClipart.com

On the other side are the revolutionary companies such as Heartland Robotics whose focus is to develop robotic assistants - the so-called "co-robots." These will be more affordable, easily trainable, safe and flexible for human environment but not as precise as the evolutionary ones. And they will address the needs of the biggest manufacturing sector in the country: SMEs - small and medium-sized enterprises. This video, made by the EU SME Project, visually highlights those needs.

Will robots make a difference?
Certainly the Foxconn deployment will be a boon to one or more non-U.S. industrial robot manufacturer (America long-ago lost this market - a market started in America - to foreign competitors). Foxconn's actions might speed up the use of industrial robots in other high-volume production situations, but it's not a market-changing phenomena. Instead, one thing is clear - that the service robotics market, where most of the growth in robotics is happening, and which is not dominated by any single company or country (as is the case with industrial robots) is the market where there is hope for American manufacturing.

If any competitive breakthrough product(s) are to offset Foxconn's plans, and the very-likely roll-out of the other foreign industrial robot makers to parlay Foxconn's actions with new-industry deployments of their own, particularly in Asia, if some new true robotic assistant is developed that is low-cost, lower cost of entry, easy to train, flexible, and safe to work alongside humans, the first to market will create a whole new arena, a whole new marketplace, with new manufacturing jobs, and a whole new product family ushering in the "real" robotic age. That's why everyone is so interested in Heartland Robotics. They are a privately-funded start-up focusing on a large, untapped market with a low cost product family perfectly matched up to the needs of the market. If they can pull it off, there's hope. If not, some other company, somewhere else in the world, will do so and the global SME marketplace will be theirs.

Robots help keep costs down and productivity high. The cost of entry isn't prohibitive but involves changing the mix of labor from skilled to very skilled. They are and will continue to be a staple in the manufacturing arsenal. Further, maintaining a homeland base of manufacturing is important for security, jobs, the balance of trade, and as part of sustaining a middle class. Robots can help, but national leadership can inspire the changes needed for America to play the role it has in the past, and wants for the future... a role which includes an ever-increasing use of robots in all facits of society.

Big Changes in Robotic Manufacturing

2011 is a pivotal year for industrial and service robots. In fact, we may see the marriage of industrial with service robots to be used as assistants in manufacturing. The recent launches in Europe of pi4-robotics' workerbot and Japan's Motoman's two-armed headless robot, and the anticipated 2011 launch in the U.S. of Heartland Robotics' factory assistant robot are examples of this trend.

Henrik Christensen (Director Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology) said in a recent ROBOTICA Forum:

In manufacturing only through use of automation can we reduce the need to out-source. Our workers are not going to be more effective in doing manual labor, but with the right tools they can be more effective and the motivation to outsource less pronounced. Companies are starting to realize that once you start an out-sourcing process it may result in all of the process going off-shore. That happened in textiles and apparel and the poster child in the IT industry is the IBM ThinkPad transformation to Lenovo laptops. Also the disk drive industry had a similar move to Singapore.

To be effective, robots have to be lower cost and higher dexterity. We are starting to see this - and the cost of integration is also coming down.

The recently released 2010 robotics industry reports from the International Federation of Robotics said:

Dramatic advances in robotics and automation technologies are even more critical with the next generation of high-value products that rely on embedded computers, advanced sensors and microelectronics requiring micro- and nano-scale assembly, for which labor-intensive manufacturing with [low-skilled] human workers is no longer a viable option.

Here are some quotes from the Heartland Robotics website that are more real than hyperbole:

Today's manufacturing robots are big and stiff, unsafe for people to be around, engineered to be precise and repeatable, not adaptable. Normal workers can't touch them.

Our robots will be intuitive to use, intelligent and highly flexible.  They'll be easy to buy, train, and deploy and will be unbelievably inexpensive.

Similar wording can be found on the pi4-robotics website and Motoman's.

Today's industrial robots are truly expert systems

Lest we forget, industrial robots encapsulate years of translating the skills of craftsmen to the mechanical capabilities of robots.  There's no other way that robots could have replaced their human counterparts were it not for the fact that the robot can do the same task equal to or better than the human.

Industrial robots in car factory

The know-how, where robots mimic human actions in the various aspects of the auto industry, represents decades of accumulated knowledge transfer by veteran craftsmen.

In welding, for example, the finish of welding varies, depending on the kind of metal used, its thickness and the power voltage. Craftsmen adjust the speed of welding by observing how sparks fly to get the best finish. From a story in Asahi:

About 10 years ago, Yasakawa (Motoman) started filming its craftsmen at work, using a high-speed camera to record their hand movements. The accumulated data was programmed into robots to enable them to perform tasks from several thousand options of welding that craftsmen had established over the years.

Because Yaskawa makes and uses robots at its main factory, it enables the company to pass along technical expertise from elders to their juniors.

"You can copy a robot, but not control technology that craftsmen created," said Junji Tsuda, president of Yaskawa. "(Exporting robots) is like shipping the craftsmen themselves."

"Chinese and South Korean makers are less likely to come up with such technology because they are more inclined to want results in the short term," said Akira Yoshino, the engineer-inventor of the lithium-ion battery.

Presently, robots in manufacturing are, except for the auto industry and welding apps, mostly involved in post processing and packaging rather than in the manufacturing process. [This latter point is not to be minimized - in fact, it is a booming area of robotics: picking, packing, packaging, processing, sorting and warehousing.]

But not general manufacturing!

The near-term future will see the gradual appearance of multi-purpose, flexible, easily trainable robots. We are likely to see the bridging between the expert systems of the past and these flexible systems of the future - in manufacturing in 2011.

I see three issues involved:

1. Robotics for Small and Medium-sized manufacturers and factories (SME's)
2. National strategies to solve important issues
3. Training and retraining people for the future

SME's are the life-blood of the middle class and the area of greatest jobs growth.  SME's create new jobs, contribute to the community, and produce needed products.

Yaskawa Motoman
Two-armed Factory Robot

A few years ago, in Europe, the EU recognized the need to support SME businesses with improved robotics - robotics that were easily trainable, safe to work alongside, relatively inexpensive and flexible enough to handle all sorts of ad hoc tasks in any quantity. The EU invested in the development of SME robots because they felt that without their investment production efficiencies couldn't be maintained and more and more manufacturing would move offshore. The SME project ended early in 2009 and the consortium members quickly brought products to market that address the needs of SME's. These include two-armed robots, safety sensors and train-by-example programming. The EU also invested in the PiSa Project which had a similar goal.  The pi4-robotics "workerbot" mentioned above is the result of that effort. Motoman's two-armed robot is an outgrowth of the SME project and is presently replacing older robots in the Mercedes factories.

America doesn't have a national robotics agenda (roadmap) just yet even though there is effort in that direction. Congress was presented with a roadmap in May, 2009. There has been some movement from the Obama Administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy including some SBA funding and some targeted areas of robotic development funding opportunities from five different government agencies. But robotics are not yet on the national agenda - there's no U.S. Robotics Initiative as there is for other areas of development.

Nor is there a real training and retraining mechanism for keeping up with the changing technological landscape. Instead, we fear losing jobs rather than understanding that we will instead change the mix of workers (as is generally the case when robots enter the picture).  Yes we have FIRST programs, and interesting robo-competitions all oriented to interest students in STEM education. But we are very lax in our science education overall and really don't have a national reeducation program for our workforce.

What America has is an entrepreneurial system of funding (which I described back in January ("Financing the Strawberry Project")) supplemented by irregular special purposes like national defense (DARPA), homeland security and space exploration. If an inventor/business has a good enough idea to get past the angel investors and on to the real VCs, he/she will get enough money to get it off the ground.  It's part salesmanship, part product, and timing, rather than an outgrowth of a national agenda to help society.

It's great to wish Heartland Robotics well but it isn't right that they are America's only knight in shining armor (if it turns out that they really are). Also, if they are successful they will be contributing to the jobs issue by changing the mix of workers from low-skilled to highly skilled. Without a retraining program in place, there will likely be serious repercussions, a lot of bad press, and slowdowns.

Bill Gates, Samsung, the government of South Korea, Toyota, Ray Kurzweil and many others are predicting that there will be a robot in our homes, companies and cars in this decade.  It truly is a political issue - one of technological complexity, national importance and economic strategy - to make sure that we don't derail ourselves with pettiness, greed, apathy and inaction.