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testing22321 16 hours ago

IF they work (and that is a massive, massive if), every factory on earth will replace every human with them.

It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50?

Place your bets!

adastra22 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?

tonyhart7 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI

china dark factory

oblio 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Factory robots have almost nothing in common with humanoid robots and are probably at least 10000x simpler.

adastra22 14 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s the point!

testing22321 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not mostly, no.

But I toured an auto assembly plant of a major US OEM recently and there were a ton of humans on the line.

Unions will be an issue, but all the OEMs are walking dead anyway.

adastra22 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Tour Toyota. It’s be lights-out except for all the people there on tours to see the mechanical marvels.

impure-aqua 10 hours ago | parent [-]

That is true of press, weld, and paint stages, which gives you a chassis and nothing else. It is absolutely not lights out for "final assembly" which despite the name is how massive amounts of the car comes together.

Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.)

But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting.

Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated.

Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch.

It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.

AlexandrB 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Wiring harnesses seem like the final boss of manufacturing automation. A lot of times they're still built entirely by hand, and also installed by hand.

Automation is really good at assembly of stiff, solid objects. Anything soft and flexible seems too error prone. See also: the garment industry.

testing22321 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Which is why Tesla went so hard on the harness for cyber truck, to learn how to do it for the next vehicles