Skilled Work, Without the Worker
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
August 18, 2012 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html

DRACHTEN, the Netherlands - At the Philips Electronics
factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use
their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric
shavers. That is the old way.

At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128
robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility.
Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the
capability of the most dexterous human.

One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two
connector wires and slips them into holes almost too
small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that
they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the
people supervising them from being injured. And they do
it all without a coffee break - three shifts a day, 365
days a year.

All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per
shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese
city of Zhuhai.

This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept
than those now commonly used by automakers and other
heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the
world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories
like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking
counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer
electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands
of low-skilled workers.

"With these machines, we can make any consumer device in
the world," said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer
who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.

Many industry executives and technology experts say
Philips's approach is gaining ground on Apple's. Even as
Foxconn, Apple's iPhone manufacturer, continues to build
new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to
make smartphones, it plans to install more than a
million robots within a few years to supplement its work
force in China.

Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be
displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has
publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of
his more than one million employees worldwide, he said
in January, according to the official Xinhua news
agency: "As human beings are also animals, to manage one
million animals gives me a headache."

The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots
have touched off a renewed debate among economists and
technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This
year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case
for a rapid transformation. "The pace and scale of this
encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and
has profound economic implications," they wrote in their
book, "Race Against the Machine."

In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation
foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in
agricultural technology over the last century, when
farming employment in the United States fell from 40
percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The
analogy is not only to the industrialization of
agriculture but also to the electrification of
manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.

"At what point does the chain saw replace Paul Bunyan?"
asked Mike Dennison, an executive at Flextronics, a
manufacturer of consumer electronics products that is
based in Silicon Valley and is increasingly automating
assembly work. "There's always a price point, and we're
very close to that point."

But Bran Ferren, a veteran roboticist and industrial
product designer at Applied Minds in Glendale, Calif.,
argues that there are still steep obstacles that have
made the dream of the universal assembly robot elusive.
"I had an early naïveté about universal robots that
could just do anything," he said. "You have to have
people around anyway. And people are pretty good at
figuring out, how do I wiggle the radiator in or slip
the hose on? And these things are still hard for robots
to do."

Beyond the technical challenges lies resistance from
unionized workers and communities worried about jobs.
The ascension of robots may mean fewer jobs are created
in this country, even though rising labor and
transportation costs in Asia and fears of intellectual
property theft are now bringing some work back to the
West.

Take the cavernous solar-panel factory run by
Flextronics in Milpitas, south of San Francisco. A large
banner proudly proclaims "Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing
Back to California!" (Right now China makes a large
share of the solar panels used in this country and is
automating its own industry.)

Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly
line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are
robots everywhere and few human workers. All of the
heavy lifting and almost all of the precise work is done
by robots that string together solar cells and seal them
under glass. The human workers do things like trimming
excess material, threading wires and screwing a handful
of fasteners into a simple frame for each panel.

Such advances in manufacturing are also beginning to
transform other sectors that employ millions of workers
around the world. One is distribution, where robots that
zoom at the speed of the world's fastest sprinters can
store, retrieve and pack goods for shipment far more
efficiently than people. Robots could soon replace
workers at companies like C & S Wholesale Grocers, the
nation's largest grocery distributor, which has already
deployed robot technology.

Rapid improvement in vision and touch technologies is
putting a wide array of manual jobs within the abilities
of robots. For example, Boeing's wide-body commercial
jets are now riveted automatically by giant machines
that move rapidly and precisely over the skin of the
planes. Even with these machines, the company said it
struggles to find enough workers to make its new 787
aircraft. Rather, the machines offer significant
increases in precision and are safer for workers.

And at Earthbound Farms in California, four newly
installed robot arms with customized suction cups
swiftly place clamshell containers of organic lettuce
into shipping boxes. The robots move far faster than the
people they replaced. Each robot replaces two to five
workers at Earthbound, according to John Dulchinos, an
engineer who is the chief executive at Adept Technology,
a robot maker based in Pleasanton, Calif., that
developed Earthbound's system.

Robot manufacturers in the United States say that in
many applications, robots are already more cost-
effective than humans.

At an automation trade show last year in Chicago, Ron
Potter, the director of robotics technology at an
Atlanta consulting firm called Factory Automation
Systems, offered attendees a spreadsheet to calculate
how quickly robots would pay for themselves.

In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially
cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each
earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the
system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and
productivity savings.

The Obama administration says this technological shift
presents a historic opportunity for the nation to stay
competitive. "The only way we are going to maintain
manufacturing in the U.S. is if we have higher
productivity," said Tom Kalil, deputy director of the
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Government officials and industry executives argue that
even if factories are automated, they still are a
valuable source of jobs. If the United States does not
compete for advanced manufacturing in industries like
consumer electronics, it could lose product engineering
and design as well. Moreover, robotics executives argue
that even though blue-collar jobs will be lost, more
efficient manufacturing will create skilled jobs in
designing, operating and servicing the assembly lines,
as well as significant numbers of other kinds of jobs in
the communities where factories are.

And robot makers point out that their industry itself
creates jobs. A report commissioned by the International
Federation of Robotics last year found that 150,000
people are already employed by robotics manufacturers
worldwide in engineering and assembly jobs.

But American and European dominance in the next
generation of manufacturing is far from certain.

"What I see is that the Chinese are going to apply
robots too," said Frans van Houten, Philips's chief
executive. "The window of opportunity to bring
manufacturing back is before that happens."

A Faster Assembly Line

Royal Philips Electronics began making the first
electric shavers in 1939 and set up the factory here in
Drachten in 1950. But Mr. Visser, the engineer who
manages the assembly, takes pride in the sophistication
of the latest shavers. They sell for as much as $350
and, he says, are more complex to make than smartphones.

The assembly line here is made up of dozens of glass
cages housing robots made by Adept Technology that snake
around the factory floor for more than 100 yards. Video
cameras atop the cages guide the robot arms almost
unerringly to pick up the parts they assemble. The arms
bend wires with millimetric accuracy, set toothpick-thin
spindles in tiny holes, grab miniature plastic gears and
set them in housings, and snap pieces of plastic into
place.

The next generation of robots for manufacturing will be
more flexible and easier to train.

Witness the factory of Tesla Motors, which recently
began manufacturing the Tesla S, a luxury sedan, in
Fremont, Calif., on the edge of Silicon Valley.

More than half of the building is shuttered, called "the
dark side." It still houses a dingy, unused Toyota
Corolla assembly line on which an army of workers once
turned out half a million cars annually.

The Tesla assembly line is a stark contrast, brilliantly
lighted. Its fast-moving robots, bright Tesla red, each
has a single arm with multiple joints. Most of them are
imposing, 8 to 10 feet tall, giving them a slightly
menacing "Terminator" quality.

But the arms seem eerily human when they reach over to a
stand and change their "hand" to perform a different
task. While the many robots in auto factories typically
perform only one function, in the new Tesla factory a
robot might do up to four: welding, riveting, bonding
and installing a component.

As many as eight robots perform a ballet around each
vehicle as it stops at each station along the line for
just five minutes. Ultimately as many as 83 cars a day -
roughly 20,000 are planned for the first year - will be
produced at the factory. When the company adds a sport
utility vehicle next year, it will be built on the same
assembly line, once the robots are reprogrammed.

Tesla's factory is tiny but represents a significant bet
on flexible robots, one that could be a model for the
industry. And others are already thinking bigger.

Hyundai and Beijing Motors recently completed a mammoth
factory outside Beijing that can produce a million
vehicles a year using more robots and fewer people than
the big factories of their competitors and with the same
flexibility as Tesla's, said Paul Chau, an American
venture capitalist at WI Harper who toured the plant in
June.

The New Warehouse

Traditional and futuristic systems working side by side
in a distribution center north of New York City show how
robotics is transforming the way products are
distributed, threatening jobs. From this warehouse in
Newburgh, C & S, the nation's largest grocery
wholesaler, supplies a major supermarket chain.

The old system sprawls across almost half a million
square feet. The shelves are loaded and unloaded around
the clock by hundreds of people driving pallet jacks and
forklifts. At peak times in the evening, the warehouse
is a cacophony of beeping and darting electric vehicles
as workers with headsets are directed to cases of food
by a computer that speaks to them in four languages.

The new system is much smaller, squeezed into only
30,000 square feet at the far end of the warehouse and
controlled by just a handful of technicians. They watch
over a four-story cage with different levels holding 168
"rover" robots the size of go-carts. Each can move at 25
miles an hour, nearly as fast as an Olympic sprinter.

Each rover is connected wirelessly to a central computer
and on command will race along an aisle until it reaches
its destination - a case of food to retrieve or the spot
to drop one off for storage. The robot gathers a box by
extending two-foot-long metal fingers from its side and
sliding them underneath. It lifts the box and pulls it
to its belly. Then it accelerates to the front of the
steel cage, where it turns into a wide lane where it
must contend with traffic - eight robots are active on
each level of the structure, which is 20 aisles wide and
21 levels high.

From the aisle, the robots wait their turn to pull into
a special open lane where they deposit each load into an
elevator that sends a stream of food cases down to a
conveyor belt that leads to a large robot arm.

About 10 feet tall, the arm has the grace and dexterity
of a skilled supermarket bagger, twisting and turning
each case so the final stack forms an eight-foot cube.
The software is sophisticated enough to determine which
robot should pick up which case first, so when the order
arrives at the supermarket, workers can take the cases
out in the precise order in which they are to go on the
shelves.

When the arm is finished, the cube of goods is conveyed
to a machine that wraps it in clear plastic to hold it
in place. Then a forklift operator summoned by the
computer moves the cube to a truck for shipment.

Built by Symbotic, a start-up company based in the
Boston area, this robotic warehouse is inspired by
computer designers who created software algorithms to
efficiently organize data to be stored on a computer's
hard drive.

Jim Baum, Symbotic's chief executive, compares the new
system to a huge parallel computer. The design is
efficient because there is no single choke point; the
cases of food moving through the robotic warehouse are
like the digital bits being processed by the computer.

Humans' Changing Role

In the decade since he began working as a warehouseman
in Tolleson, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, Josh Graves has
seen how automation systems can make work easier but
also create new stress and insecurity. The giant
facility where he works distributes dry goods for Kroger
supermarkets.

Mr. Graves, 29, went to work in the warehouse, where his
father worked for three decades, right out of high
school. The demanding job required lifting heavy boxes
and the hours were long. "They would bring in 15 guys,
and only one would last," he said.

Today Mr. Graves drives a small forklift-like machine
that stores and retrieves cases of all sizes. Because
such workers are doing less physical labor, there are
fewer injuries, said Rome Aloise, a Teamsters vice
president in Northern California. Because a computer
sets the pace, the stress is now more psychological.

Mr. Graves wears headsets and is instructed by a
computerized voice on where to go in the warehouse to
gather or store products. A centralized computer the
workers call The Brain dictates their speed. Managers
know exactly what the workers do, to the precise minute.

Several years ago, Mr. Graves's warehouse installed a
German system that automatically stores and retrieves
cases of food. That led to the elimination of 106 jobs,
roughly 20 percent of the work force. The new system was
initially maintained by union workers with high
seniority. Then that job went to the German company,
which hired nonunion workers.

Now Kroger plans to build a highly automated warehouse
in Tolleson. Sixty union workers went before the City
Council last year to oppose the plan, on which the city
has not yet ruled.

"We don't have a problem with the machines coming," Mr.
Graves told city officials. "But tell Kroger we don't
want to lose these jobs in our city."

Some jobs are still beyond the reach of automation:
construction jobs that require workers to move in
unpredictable settings and perform different tasks that
are not repetitive; assembly work that requires tactile
feedback like placing fiberglass panels inside
airplanes, boats or cars; and assembly jobs where only a
limited quantity of products are made or where there are
many versions of each product, requiring expensive
reprogramming of robots.

But that list is growing shorter.

Upgrading Distribution

Inside a spartan garage in an industrial neighborhood in
Palo Alto, Calif., a robot armed with electronic "eyes"
and a small scoop and suction cups repeatedly picks up
boxes and drops them onto a conveyor belt.

It is doing what low-wage workers do every day around
the world.

Older robots cannot do such work because computer vision
systems were costly and limited to carefully controlled
environments where the lighting was just right. But
thanks to an inexpensive stereo camera and software that
lets the system see shapes with the same ease as humans,
this robot can quickly discern the irregular dimensions
of randomly placed objects.

The robot uses a technology pioneered in Microsoft's
Kinect motion sensing system for its Xbox video game
system.

Such robots will put automation within range of
companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service
that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such
tasks.

The start-up behind the robot, Industrial Perception
Inc., is the first spinoff of Willow Garage, an
ambitious robotics research firm based in Menlo Park,
Calif. The first customer is likely to be a company that
now employs thousands of workers to load and unload its
trucks. The workers can move one box every six seconds
on average. But each box can weigh more than 130 pounds,
so the workers tire easily and sometimes hurt their
backs.

Industrial Perception will win its contract if its
machine can reliably move one box every four seconds.
The engineers are confident that the robot will soon do
much better than that, picking up and setting down one
box per second.

"We're on the cusp of completely changing manufacturing
and distribution," said Gary Bradski, a machine-vision
scientist who is a founder of Industrial Perception. "I
think it's not as singular an event, but it will
ultimately have as big an impact as the Internet."

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