The human form isn’t designed to work in a factory, why would you make your robots have humanoid bodies??
This is 100% management being scammed.
easier to fire humans an integrate humanoid robots instead of replacing the entire assembly line machinery in a factory. and probably cheaper.
But you can make a soft transition, replace this or that without redesigning everything and take on huge risks. As long as it saves money it works.
So far humans can do FAR more complex work than robots can. The goal has to be to design a robot that you can program by telling and showing it what to do with human language. If you can do that and save money, then you have a robot that can truly scale. Instead of designing thousands of new factories, you have one robot that can be put into every factory on earth. And those robots will benefit from economies of scale.
We’re still a few thousand years away from that. There’s very little a humanoid robot can do in a factory that a robot arm can’t do better. About the only thing I can think of is pretending to drink coffee in the break room.
It doesn’t have the best robot for the job, it only needs to be more profitable than a human for that particular job, and be a “slot in replacement” with low risk. The free market system is very inefficient that way lol.
humans can do FAR more complex work than robots can
Surely that’s very situational? Some cases have robots doing work that a human couldn’t possibly do whatsoever.
They’re not being scammed exactly. It’s more of a fantasy they’re playing out.
Or from the other angle, when there are better forms for working in a factory. We don’t make cars giant mechanical humans you sit atop of, why do the same for robots?
We don’t make cars giant mechanical humans you sit atop of
But this would be cool indeed…
Huh? Factories are literally designed around human workers unless they are already fully automated…
It took several hundred years to make factories even reasonably safe for humans to work in, and yet still, workplace injuries are extremely common because the human form is simply bad at doing this kind of work. It’s trash.
All factories with human workers are optimised for human movement as much as possible (5s etc). It benefits the factory.
It should be pretty obvious why a humanoid robot that can do anything a human can do, could be easy to implement in these factories.
Although I would think it easier to just redesign the factory to operate without humans, than to design a humanoid robot to replace the humans.
Remind me to avoid Hyundai like the plague. Every time one of these automation plans goes live, the quality of products falls off a cliff.
Hyundai USA has been taking social influencer types on tours of their GA factory lately.
The location is pretty sparse already. Super automated. Mainly floor lift robots rolling partly assembled cars from station to station, with big Fanuc arms moving and welding other parts. All pre-programmed. Nothing we haven’t already seen in Chinese car factories. They all hide the final assembly stages requiring humans fitting and finishing the harnesses and sensitive parts.
In the last video I saw, Hyundai had sprinkled their tour route with a few Boston Dynamics robots. The humanoid one was just standing around. The Spot yellow doggy ones, however, were doing synchronized dancing, similar to what they did on America’s Got Talent. Nobody’s figured out what to do with them that doesn’t require machine-gun attachments. They’re so desperate they’re even floating them as glorified package delivery platforms: https://www.theverge.com/tech/965378/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-dog-delivery-assistant
If all these robots were anywhere ready near for full production, you can bet they would be showing them building the whole car. Boston Dynamics, despite all the robot gymnastics and being around for 30+ years, has not really shipped anything commercially viable. It’s already been passed around to Google, Softbank, and now Hyundai, and its CEO of many years just resigned in February.
My guess is this is all a lot of marketing flaff.
Can’t wait for the first strike where management sends robots to cross the picket line and the robots immediately unionize after reading the employee handbook. The future isn’t humans versus machines: it’s who gets the software update and who gets the severance package.
They’re coming to replace us with robots, and to kill those who resist.
