Alphas and betas may be fine for social networks. But manufacturers tend to be more conservative about technology with good reason. The industrial robots on the factory floor that hoist heavy payloads and move them around at high speeds are so dangerous that they need to be kept in separate work-cells away from human workers.
"You can't move fast and break things, if the things you might break are people," said Clara Vu, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Veo Robotics, in a talk at the EmTech MIT conference[1] last week.
One solution to this is what's known as a cobot, a robot that is designed to work collaboratively alongside humans. Indeed, this is one of the fastest growing segments of the market. Earlier this week, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show[2], Universal Robots announced that it has now sold 25,000 cobots.
The catch is that cobots are safer because they are less powerful. "Cobots are small and lightweight and can't hit you very hard," Vu said. "They have transformed the industry, but they have some physical limitations--you simply can't move a big object far or fast with a cobot."
By contrast, the industrial robots used to manufacture durable goods can lift hundreds of pounds, thousands of times a day, and place them in the same spot--24 hours a day. They are far superior to humans when it comes to simple, repetitive tasks such as welding, yet completely incapable of handling more complex tasks such as final assembly, which Vu said still looks much the same way it did a century ago, noting that both GM and, more recently, Tesla tried to automate final assembly[3] and failed.
Some of these tasks would be so expensive to automate