Toyota to Employ Advanced Robots

olegalexandrov writes "Toyota Motor will introduce robots which can work as well or better than humans at all 12 of its factories in Japan to cut costs and deal with a looming labor shortage. The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese laborers, a report said on Thursday." The Motley Fool has a humorous take, and Toyota emphasizes that goodlife, err, humans will continue to have a place in Toyota factories.

Comments

Re:looming

[RealAlaskan]

If by looming labor shortage they mean layoffs

I think that ``looming labor shortage'' refers to their looming demographic crisis.

Japan's population is aging fast. They're getting older at the rate of one year per year, of course, but they aren't breeding fast enough to replace themselves. That's going to have lots of effects on Japan, most of them bad. One of those bad effects will be a labor shortage. You see, the number of people who are both willing and physically able to work is going to fall off as the current generation of workers gets too old to work.

Europe is facing the same problem, and they're dealing with it via gastarbeiters. Apparently, Japan is going to deal with it using robots.

Industrial Robots

[nameer]

For the most part, they are talking about industrial robots . These are not C3P0 by a long shot. Even the instalation of car seats is semi-automated already. Fully automating this, while an intersting challenge, does not involve anthropomorphic robots.

Building anthropomorphic robots for an assembly line is (in this engineers opinion) inefficient. The tool should be matched to do the job specifically at had. Hell, Toyota was one of the companies that started the buzz in Lean Manufacturing.

I work with robots. Robots are my friends. You, sir, are no robot. Wait, I mean you, sir, are not thinking of the right robot.