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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.
It's practical, machines need no lights, that's for humans. It's also symbolic, a display that you have achieved complete automation in your manufacturing. It's called "lights out factory", a concept that you can build a factory like a black box, with nothing but in and out warehousing to worry about.
Reality is that truly lights out factories are rare, very rare. Often there is actually tons of manual labor involved that is just hidden deeper down in the supply chain.
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.
"Lights out" is an old term, been around for ages.
The new world is "Lights On". Old robots were blind and dumb, and did not need light. New robots have cameras and can see, and, to a very limited extent, think. That is the big new thing that is starting to hit the world.
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.
Not the greatest news for Chinese working class...
It's robots all the way down!