Will robots replace humans?
In the past decade industry had some key changes in the way we view production process. Industry 4.0 slowly gets integrated in production lines creating a lot of new innovations like smart production, robot rent, collaborative robots. We can see increasing use of these terms in the media. KUKA was a step ahead and released first collaborative robot few years ago, these 7-axis robots are fully operational without any external safety systems and can work with humans in its work envelope. These robots are the best collaborative bot in the market today and constantly gets more attention from industry. Investing in new, just released technologies can be risky, but iiwa (Kuka collaborative robot) already has been successfully integrated in production by the biggest manufacturers in Europe. Smaller companies start to look into collaborative robots as new opportunities for universal automation when normal automation is way to expensive for small production.
Industry 4.0
Industry 4.0 is quite new term, but some people think it’s inevitable future. UAB Serpantinas attended KUKA annual meet and discussed about new technologies and ideas how to further automate factories. Unbelievable concepts like lights-out manufacturing and batch size 1 production now seems possible and are getting a lot of attention from KUKA.Lights-out manufacturing
Lights-out manufacturing term was mentioned for the first time in literature piece called “Autofac”. The term relates to production philosophy more than technology. Technology needed is way different for wide range of processes used in todays industry. Nonetheless first fully automated plant which works in the dark was build in 2001 years, it produces industrial robots and can operate without human intervention for 30 days, during that time light are turned out. The biggest problem which holds companies from lights-out manufacturing is that robots needs to be tended and there are no good alternatives for universal human who can make proper decisions in unique and unpredictable situation. Ever improving artificial intelligence technology soon might enable lights-out production.Batch size 1 production
Future production will become universal and batches will decrease in size, every customer will get unique and specialized product. Abroad production delivery times will be too long to remain competitive in the market. As a consequence, storage will be minimal and production will be local. To achieve such production a lot of data has to be analyzed and here we have correlation with industry 4.0. For some products it is still too complex, but we already have great examples how to make this production a reality. Adidas created speedfactory which produces sportswear, but not ordinary models, but custom design ones. Heavily automating all the processes with robots, automation and smart data analysis allows to achieve same delivery times like ordinary production. In spite of the fact that the production is individual, factory can achieve incredible production speeds and efficiency allowing to maintain competitive price. All this improvement in technology comes from increasing demand for custom, original and specialized products.It’s becoming really hard to predict future market development and technologies it will require to stay relevant. Fortunately the upcoming decade strategies seems to be clear, specialized and good quality production which can be easily achieved with newest KUKA technologies.
