How do you think of robotics?

As technologies mature, the way we think of them evolves. We no longer think of the automobile as a horseless carriage. The way we think of a technology affects how we use it. Robotics is one of those technologies that has undergone a transition of thought and application. Which view of robotics is driving your thought process?

I've seen robotics evolve through three distinct stages of thought. As we progress through these stages, we extract higher levels of value from the technology as it becomes more and more widely deployed.

In the first stage, we gave robots human attributes. Much as early automobiles were thought of as replacements for horses, robots were thought of as direct replacements for people. Even though hard automation replaced many more people than did robots, somehow managers and workers viewed robots differently. It was almost as if people thought that the robots might get together and unionize. We named our robots, put funny hats on them, and sought to instill them with human qualities. Decisions between hard automation and robotic automation were influenced as much by the human resource department as they were by the engineering department. I call this the humanoid stage.

In the second stage, robots shed their human attributes to be viewed as the master component of free-standing robotic work cells. These cells performed specific functions such as collating, boxing, or palletizing. Our acquistion of robotics was defined and constrained by our ideas about the functions that we wanted to have performed on the products moving through the workcell. The cell might include conveyors, pushers, vision systems, gluers, printers or a variety of additional components. The marketing effort focused less on the robot and more on the workcell and the functions it was designed to perform. I call this the functional workcell stage.

In the third stage, the role of the robot is demeaned to that of a motion component. When we buy a packaging machine, we pay little or no attention to the components used to implement a 1 or 2 axis linear motion or a rotation. Those are details left to the machine builder. Whether that motion is implemented with cams, gears, or cylinders is an engineering decision aimed at producing the most cost effective and reliable outcome. Functions requiring 2, 3 or more degrees of freedom of movement are typically performed by multiple components, working either in simultaneous or sequential fashion. If a robotic arm is thought of as a component of a machine, one now has a single component that has the capability of implementing 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 axis programmable movements within the machine. This is a very powerful capability in what I shall call the component stage.

Perhaps we will see robotics evolve even further with new ways of thinking about their application. But for now, I see our applications being quided by whether we think of robots as being humanoids, functional workcells or components. Most packagers today are working from the mind-set of robots being part of functional workcells. The humanoid model has largely been left behind and the component model is moving forward with some creative machine builders. How is robotics being thought about and applied in your company?

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