Manufacturing technology
According to the International Federation of Robotics, 57,040 new cobots were installed worldwide in 2023.
That is a point also made strongly by Neues.
Technology in and of itself is not a guarantee of greater productivity, he says. Adding a cobot to an already imperfect process will not suddenly make it better. “You need to understand what the human is doing, understand that process and validate that process. It’s important to understand the process, the environment and the duties to be done,” says Neues. “Then we can create the technology that is necessary.” He says AMRs generally lend themselves to mass production processes, while ‘arm’ machines are better suited to low-quantity processes. “For mass production, cobot arms are slower because you do not want to create harm and so instead you apply technology like the AMRs to feed the lines. With a low-quantity process, you can apply the cobot technology with the arm.”
Introducing new co-workers In either case, though, humans need to understand that the machines are going to be working right alongside them. “If you look at a robot, it’s designed to work in isolation and in a defined space – defined in the sense it’s rigid, it’s fixed,” says Neues. “You designate that the robot should operate there. This space is separated, and you don’t have access to this space because there is the risk of harm to humans through the robot. “The big disadvantage of this set-up is you always have to have a sequential flow in the process. There is a task for a human, and then you hand it over to the robot through a defined interface. The robot is doing something and so on. The approach of a cobot is using the same workspace together with the humans. You let humans do the tasks that they are good at, so they co-create. The robot is a co-worker for the humans.”
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And that’s why Neues says the granting of a name is so important. It represents an understanding that the cobot is a colleague rather than a replacement – something that workers do commonly worry about. “Through some early installations we discovered that people were afraid when they saw cobots. They had fear of, ‘Oh, they want to kill my job’, or ‘It’s a dangerous device’.
“But it is not dangerous and the intention is not to replace humans. Cobots are designed to work together with people, but we learnt that people are not used to working with cobots. So you have to hook humans into the process early, get them involved at a very early stage… When we now approach projects, we work in a very early phase to provide a name. That breaks the ice.” Some cobots go further still. AuxQ’s machines, which are used in diagnostic laboratories, politely ask their human colleagues to move items blocking their paths and offer a cheery ‘good night’ when clocking off time arrives. For Brown, a consideration of “the social dynamics” is vital when bringing cobots into a manufacturing environment. “Fear of job displacement may exist,” he stresses. And that worry may become more complicated still against a backdrop of growing use of artificial intelligence. Neues reports OMRON is always looking at ‘cognitive robots’ – those able to learn from their interactions and make decisions – and there is the potential for cobot and AI technology to merge. “I know AI is a buzzword but I would say it in a different way – having robots that are more adaptive to upcoming challenges in the environment. That might be a topic for the future. But the idea of a cobot is not to replace the human,” he stresses. “It is to enlarge the possibilities through co-creating.” ●
Medical Device Developments /
www.medicaldevice-developments.com
August Phunitiphat/
Shutterstock.com
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