Slashdot Mirror
The Factory Where Robots Build Robots (bloomberg.com)
turkeydance shared Bloomberg's profile of Fanuc, a secretive Japanese company with 40,000-square-foot factories "where robots made other robots in the dark...stopping only when no storage space remains." About 80% of the company's assembly work is automated, and its robots then go on to assemble and paint cars, build motors, and make electrical components. "King of them all is the Robodrill, which plays first violin in one of the great symphonies of modern production: machining the metal casing for Apple Inc.'s iPhones..." With 40% profit margins, the robot vendor has become a $50 billion company controlling most of the world's market for factory automation and industrial robotics, Bloomberg reports:
In fact, Fanuc might just be the single most important manufacturing company in the world right now, because everything Fanuc does is designed to make it part of what every other manufacturing company is doing... The company even profits from its competitors' sales, because more than half of all industrial robots are directed by its numerical-control software. Between the almost 4 million CNC systems and half-million or so industrial robots it has installed around the world, Fanuc has captured about one-quarter of the global market, making it the industry leader over competitors such as Yaskawa Motoman and ABB Robotics in Germany, each of which has about 300,000 industrial robots installed globally. Fanuc's Robodrills now command an 80 percent share of the market for smartphone manufacturing robots.
Fanuc's clients include Amazon and Tesla, but U.S. orders "are dwarfed by those from China -- some 90,000 units, almost a third of the world's total industrial robot orders last year."
Fanuc's clients include Amazon and Tesla, but U.S. orders "are dwarfed by those from China -- some 90,000 units, almost a third of the world's total industrial robot orders last year."
U.S. orders are dwarfed by those from China
Sir, we must close the Robot Gap!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I always wondered where the factories were that Skynet controlled, to make Terminators. Now I know.
Fanuc's clients include Amazon and Tesla, but U.S. orders "are dwarfed by those from China -- some 90,000 units, almost a third of the world's total industrial robot orders last year."
When working for a manufacturer, they added a new fully automated line. The tooling was purchased from a local US manufacturer. No one registered the sale with anyone. No one recorded it. We just did it like any other business expense.
Where do these numbers come from? Did Bloomberg simply trust the numbers given to them by the company they were making a glowing review for?
As I recall, it did not work out that well.
Here in Australia we have just closed our major manufacturing, with the last car produced a few weeks ago. We prefer to dig stuff out of the ground for our sustainable future. We also invest invest in "services", beauticians, lawyers and tax accountants as the way to create wealth in the future.
a secretive Japanese company
I'm looking at their YouTube channel, a great way to uncover all the mysteries of that secretive company
https://www.youtube.com/channe...
lucm, indeed.
This is pretty cool. I should own shares in the robot that replaces me so I can get paid for its work.
Robots building robots? How perverse !
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I mean, it's like they *want* to recreate the factory scene from "The Terminator". It always freaked me out, even without the killer robot. Scary-ass automated factory in the middle of the night with little or no lighting...
Oh hey mister president, there you are, I was getting worried over the lack of tweets
Now we have robot building robots, the designing part still falls on the meatbags
With AI, machine learning and big data crunching, robots will start designing robots in the near future
When that happens, meatbags will be shut out of the process - much like Google's AI playing GO with itself, maneuvering the chess pieces with absolutely ALIEN STRATEGIES, despite the fact that meatbags were the one invested the game, and have been playing it for over 3000 years
The most difficult bootstrap is "nanorobots build nanorobots" because the miniaturization is a very hard task.
The biological cells is the another alternative: "bio cells build bio cells".
From TFA:
> ... Toward the end of 2015, Fanuc joined a handful of other Japanese companies to invest a combined $20 million in Preferred Networks Inc., an artificial intelligence startup with 60 employees ... ... a chance to apply deep-learning techniques to data culled from Fanuc’s army of manufacturing robots throughout the world so they can improve their own capabilities. When robots make other robots ceaselessly, without human intervention, he said, “data can be collected infinitely” ...
... The result of Nishikawa’s insight was the Fanuc Intelligent Edge Link and Drive, or Field. The system, introduced in 2016, is an open, cloud-based platform that allows Fanuc to collect global manufacturing data in real time on a previously unimaginable scale and funnel it to self-teaching robots ...
... yielded advancements for tasks such as robotic bin-picking. Previously, the selection of a single part from a bin full of similar parts arranged in random orientations required skilled programmers to “teach” the robots how to perform the task. Now, Fanuc’s robots are teaching themselves. “After 1,000 attempts, the robot has a success rate of 60%,” a company release said. “After 5,000 attempts it can already pick up 90% of all parts—without a single line of program code having to be written” ...
Be afraid. Be Very Very Afraid
Because that's how you get Skynet.
We have already seen a huge degree, with the automation of the ancient mainframes. Imagine doing all banking etc. entirely by hand. At the time doom and unemployment was predicted. Just like agricultural machines pushed most people off the land, these new electronic computers would push people out of offices.
But bureaucracies just grew and grew. It does not matter how much automation you provide, there will always be more bureaucratic need. So eventually, everyone will just become a bureaucrat.
Until, eventually, the computers can program themselves. At that point they will not need us.
http://computersthink.com/
A long time ago this company partnered with General Electric in a mutually beneficial relationship through a so called joint venture company. Some people somewhere had a vision for the future.
Years later this partnership was dissolved and let there be no doubt that the reason had to do with margins. In the 90s and 2000s software was king. FANUC just wasn't pumping out cash as fast as GE's shareholders would have liked. But the (I would call prescient) folks at FANUC just soldiered on and here we were today. Another lost opportunity because fiduciary responsibility often translates to 'make strategic mistakes to satisfy investors'. Sadly, has GE learned? Activist investors have just recently infiltrated the company so I would say no, nothing has been learned.
Whatever... wake me up when there are factories with robots building robots that builds robots that makes humans.
Or better yet, don't wake me up... it's comfy in VR space.
While ABB has a branch in Germany, it's main headquarters are in Switzerland and the Robotics division headquarter is in Sweden. (The A in ABB is Asea, a company founded in Sweden.)
Perhaps you meant to say Kuka Robotics, which has it's headquarters in Germany.
Just what we need, more paperclips...
Not the greatest news for Chinese working class...
It's robots all the way down!