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Meet iRobot Founder Rodney Brooks's New Industrial Bot, Baxter
First time accepted submitter moon_unit2 writes "Technology Review has the scoop on a new industrial robot created by famed robotics researcher Rodney Brooks. The robot, Baxter, is completely safe, extremely adaptable, and ridiculously easy to program. By providing a way to automate simple manufacturing work, it could help make U.S. manufacturers compete with Chinese companies that rely on low-cost human labor. You can see the new robot in action in a related video of the robot in action and Brooks discussing its potential." $22 thousand and shipping next month, goes the story.
It's rather worrying actually. It's like being reassured that there is ABSOLUTELY no poison in the coffee.
crazy dynamite monkey
Options: a) raise the _minimum_ education and skill level
What? This is not the problem. The problem is in training for jobs where we need people. I know more that a few sales people at the mall with masters degrees... Yet it takes days to get a plumber or A/C repair man.
Well.. up comes the problem of coupling university education and job training.
And add the fact that to the people that are driving all the change in the U.S. right now the only valid job is CEO / other management. Plumbers, good HVAC techs, and electricians are just as valid and needed of a job as CEO. But again... our values are really, really screwed up right now.
I suspect that there are two basic answers:
1.(the shorter term): So long as robots are capable of only some things, you'll get more jobs for US workers by keeping the factory onshore, partially robotic and partially staffed, than you will by having it leave entirely. Also, the presence of parts of the supply chain tends to have synergistic effects for other parts, especially when quick turnaround is needed, so even if you have an entirely automated factory, you have a better chance that WidgetCorp will keep their engineering office across the street so they can pop in and make revisions quickly, rather than opening up across the street from their factory elsewhere.
2.(longer term, albeit not necessarily that long, depending on who you are): Yup, robots can do much of what humans can do, often for less than the humans could live a non-miserable existence on. The scope of robotic('robotic' in the broad sense that includes both big industrial arms and pure software agents capable of data-processing tasks of various sorts) capability shows no signs of decreasing. Whether this means that humans are becoming obsolete, or humans are on the verge of getting some well-earned time off is up to us. And, frankly, I'm not inclined to optimism on this one...
Don't know why it's not on the front page yet, but Dice (the job board guys?) bought slashdot and sourceforge this morning.
And before asshole moderators mod this down, know that Dice knows where you live and where you work. +5 informative this comment if you know what's good for you.
But I have built up a resistance to Iocane powder.
I wish they had showed some practical application. Moving an air hockey paddle two feet to the right isn't extremely practical. Show me it loading a dozen donuts into a donut box or something.
Sensors. Yes it has force sensors but anything else? He was having to carefully position the paddles for pickup. He talked about previous robots being "blind". But is this robot really not blind? Blind people have a sense of touch, why isn't this robot "blind"? Show me it can adapt a little using sight or ultrasound or something.
Slow. Wow. Ten seconds to move the paddle. Traditional industrial robots would do ten paddles in ten seconds. Sure they're not safe to be around running at those speeds, but this is completely at the other wrong end of the speed scale. Nobody's going to use a robot that moves like a retarded sloth. I do hope the speed can be cranked up?
I would like to have seen a very brief runthrough of the training process. Telling me ten times that it's "easy" without showing me it even once leaves me suspicious of your definition of "easy". (and of "simple")
Someone setting their hand under an object being set down really isn't a practical example of collision behavior on the manufacturing floor. Stick your head out in front of the arm's path and show me how it reacts. Does it knock you off your feet, or maybe shove you slowly to the side? Does it stop immediately and drop that fragile widget a foot down onto the bench? This demo wasn't nearly as informative as I was hoping it would be.
But I do like the "move the arms" training method. I'd put a little time into pondering how to train manufacturing robots in the past, and I was always wondering why they didn't use that approach, at least to rough out the behavior, and use an interface to tweak the positioning and timing etc. But afaik all the programming on other industrial robots to date has been purely through the console. Even if you don't eliminate the programmers or computer techs, at least being able to get a good floor worker to flesh out the robot's basic movements will save a lot of time. And if you involve them more, they can help in optimizing the behavior too I think.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
In my opinion the biggest issue with those type of jobs (Fixing other people's stuff) is that it is utterly lonely. I worked as a printer engineer for 6 months, and during that time had nobody to talk to all day long. All you get is "This is broken. Fix it." or if you're lucky you'll get offered a coffee. Worse is that everyone around you has workplace banter, water-cooler chat, even talking about work over the cubicle wall, any human interaction, while you're there with your face in a printer / washing machine / A/C unit, looked upon like a Health and Safety hazard at best.
It takes a special kind of personality to work by yourself day in, day out, with never a familiar face to greet you. I can't do it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Remember in the Jetsons where George says "These 3 day workweeks are killing me!"
That is what the view of what this type of tech was supposed to get us... the same living standard with less work. Instead the idea was turned on its ear and a lot of the benefits were kept at the very top.
I'm all for this type of stuff, but I think society has to figure out ways for this to benefit everyone. In a capitalist society is okay for the people who own the capital to benefit the most, but I don't think that's an excuse to let the rest of the society head towards poverty. When we see that in other countries we tend to call that repression.
In one of my manufacturing process classed, the prof claimed he had done a lot of work for major companies off-shoring production. He then went on to explain that they saved very little money on the cheap offshore labour. (cheap labour + long shipping = aprox same as labour here) The big savings were gained from having no or very poor environmental laws.
With that in mind I do not see this bringing much manufacturing back to North America or Europe. Plus if it was an advantage the cheap labour markets would just by the robots anyway.
The way to get manufacturing back here in my opinion, is to make a products store front cost true to what the real cost is. Ie sum of parts + labour + the cost of dealing with the waste.
I still want a baxter to play with though
You hit a vital point. Robotic automation is about to explode 10 times what it has already. The only way the US is going to get more competitive is the automate production work with fewer employees. The competition will only respond with the same. There will be a chilling reverse effect on the economy, improve US manufacturing, AND drive up unemployment rates.
The corporations will not care about the worker, and I'm not convinced it is their job to do so. Profits will be up, investors happy, management has less headaches. This is not the a unique trend either. If you haven't noticed, education, now pushing a thing called STEM is really about just the opposite to what the public thinks it is. There is not a need for more engineers, there is a need to identify and weed out the top engineer without having to hire 3-4 to find the one. He/She will provide more profit to the company than all the others combined.
Yes, profit has become a refined science, and the group who will suffer the most is Joe Average. What do we do with him, other than let him become Joe Poor?
Anyhow, I'm not against robotic manufacturing, I just think there is a terrible consequence to it, that is not being discussed or planned for.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Well, I hate to say it, but a good deal of that is probably your fault as well. I paid the bills in college as a projector/AV tech, and only rarely felt excluded or extraneous in the room. Rather than giving me nobody to chat with, it gave me everyone to chat with. I'd compare it to being a barber or a bartender, hearing everyone's gossip and stories.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I can see your point, but I must disagree. I've worked in a bar too, and while it was my place of work, I was expected to be sociable. Fixing printers, however, I was expected to FIX IT NOW YOU'RE COSTING ME MONEY I HAVE IMPORTANT WORK TO DO.
I should have pointed out that these weren't desktop laser or inkjets, these were professional wide-format plotters, where a failure cost more per minute than I made per hour.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Inconceivable!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Yes, its slow (~4-6 pick & place operations per arm per minute), and not very strong (5 lbs max weight) in the current form. These restrictions are probably semi-arbitrary in the name of safety. But thats still enough to be an incredibly big deal in a large number of manufacturing tasks. Also important, its transportable (the base is on wheels), and flexible in learning new tasks, so it doesn't have to do just one thing but starts to approach the flexibility of a minimum wage worker. And for that role, it needs to be safe more than it needs to be quick.
Lets say it can perform task X at 1/4 the rate of a manufacturing worker. But at $8/hr minimum wage + 20% in additional costs/worker-hour, say $10/hr for a minimum wage worker. So that value is at least $2.50/hr.
So it pays for itself in 1100 worker-days, compared with a minimum wage worker and only 1 shift a day. At 3 shifts/day, payback is in 1 year!
Slow is NOT a problem when it is that cheap, that flexible and that safe.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I work in a CNC Machine Shop. A robot like this would be great for unloading and reloading the Lathes for example.
I don't need it to be incredibly fast. It takes 2 or 3 minutes to run a part anyway. I just need it to be almost as fast as a person. If I can train it to pick up a blank, load it in the lathe, unload it when the cycle is complete, and stack the parts neatly in a tray, I free up a person to go complete a setup on another lathe, troubleshoot a process, complete an SPC chart, or go home and get a good nights rest while the robot runs parts for us.
It doesn't have to be fast, just fast enough.
Usually when it comes to industrial robots they'll bludgeon you to red paste if you get close to them when they're working. If all coffee by default was lethally poisonous until this one cup then the analogy would be valid, as it stands it's not.
What's that Baxter? You managed to injure 7 workers and set the factory on fire? How'd you do that? Heck, I'm not even mad, that's amazing!
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
We never learn. We're still involved in a land war in Asia!
You obviously don't look at what they do spend money on.
Some public school systems are broken, no doubt. There is also no doubt that for at least some of them (D.C. Schools are the example that proves it) lack of money is not the problem.
Yup, it's a 'fund allocation issue,' certainly.
Accompanying anecdote: When I was in high school a scant decade ago, the board decided to cut orchestra and ceramics for lack of funding - the same year, they approved an brand new $2,000,000 building for the football/American football teams (pretty much just locker rooms and storage).
Of course, school boards (and sport parents) support these sort of decisions by claiming that sports bring in money - the part they leave out is that the sports programs are still a net loss, as they tend to cost 1.5 - 3 times as much to operate as they generate in revenue. But, that's not the important part here, the important part is that arts and sciences suffer so that school board members and parents can spend more time watching minors knock each other senseless.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
There will be a chilling reverse effect on the economy, improve US manufacturing, AND drive up unemployment rates.
This, in a nutshell, is the Lump of Labor Fallacy.
As production costs fall, demand increases, and other areas of the economy expand. This happened when agriculture was invented, again when agriculture was mechanized, again with the industrial revolution, again with electrification and computerized automation. All of these led to higher standards of living (the opposite of what your theory predicts). 80% of our economy is already services, so lower production costs of goods will not have as much impact as in the past, but that impact will almost certainly be positive.