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The Auto Plants of the Future May Have a Surprisingly Human Touch (reuters.com)
Carmakers have big plans for their next generation of factories: smarter designs, artificial intelligence and collaborative robots building a wide range of vehicles on the same line. From a report: The plants will also feature a component they say is the secret ingredient to flexible manufacturing: humans. SAIC-GM's factory in Shanghai, which opened in 2016, is one of the world's most advanced auto plants, assembling Buick minivans and Cadillac sedans and SUVs, including the CT-6 plug-in hybrid for U.S. consumers. GM's Shanghai plant is expected to eventually produce new electric vehicles, primarily for the Chinese market, executives have said. The plant, which GM operates with Chinese partner SAIC Motor Corp Ltd, feels almost like a scene from a Star Wars film, with battalions of machines quietly working in self-directed harmony. Collaborative robots, or "cobots," painted matte green and unrestrained by the steel cages that surround their larger industrial cousins, are being programmed to work alongside humans on the line. One unusual operation advanced models now handle is installing gears in transmissions.
Luddites! We will all 3D print our cars in our 3D printed living rooms in our 3D printed houses... on Mars!
Is this story about cars or what? I don't see any mention of Elon Musk.
In Robot repair and maintenance!
Just think of how much GM tech is now in the hands of the Chinese. Way to go, GM!
There is so much stupid in this post it'd be tough to know where to begin, I can't give an entire college course on the fundamentals of being human in a comments section. It will not pan out the way shortsighted engineers think it will, that much I can tell you. I'm convinced there's something in the water in California at this point.
That's why they're working on a repair robot!
Hopefully it will help Ford make trucks and SUVs.
I love how this story is all feel-good "we need humans in factories after all," but it never describes one single job that a human is required to do. They tell us that automation can't replace critical thinking -- O RLY? "People do the work requiring dexterity and intelligence," it says. Yeah, like humans have more "dexterity" than a robot and nobody has ever automated a process requiring intelligence before. And the rest of the story describes visions of "battalions" of robots, hundreds of robots, even robots that have been painted a special color to denote that humans can feel safe around them. The robots are stronger than humans and, we are told, "they can actually feel."
Nice spin on that headline, Reuters.
Breakfast served all day!
Player Piano is becoming more real by the minute.
Why WOULDN'T the goal be to move more and more tasks to the perfectly repeatable robots over the slow and inefficient human over time, until there's nothing left for the human to do?
Since no one probably RTFA and it wasn't mentioned, what this means is robots that are sensitive to impacts outside their programmed maneuvers and can avoid stupid humans getting in the way.
So if a robot encounters resistance where it's not expected, it stops. It's the same kind of response that you see with the table saws these days that detect your finger touching the blade and stops it before you get cut.
I believe they also incorporate heat sensors and other sensors to detect people and can predict when the robot actions might impact them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Well, you are self replicating and you do breed like rabbits.
And that's the way we like you!
-Robot Overlords
Meanwhile at the GM factory in Youngstown.
Are we great yet?
I'm not sure why the poster thought that installing gears in a transmission was an odd thing for robots to do. With today's insanely complex 8 and 10 speed automatic transmissions, I don't want some high school dropout who's hungover from the night before putting my next transmission together for me!
Over the years one thing I've seen over and over is the huge difference having a few good people at the right time and place makes. It's often occured to me that you could excel at anything by just trying a little harder than other guy does to find good people. So the idea of a highly automated factory that also cleverly leverages human potential sounded plausible to me.
But your post human potential has a downside too. The mentality of any group collectively never rises far above its least common denominator.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Because cars last longer these days, the poor and lower middle class mostly buy used cars. The wealthy want new, of course. This means manufacturers who better cater to the finicky tastes of the wealthy get the sale.
Cranking out the same model in large quantities as cheap as possible is no longer a competitive strategy because the poor buy used and the rich don't want generic cars. But it's hard to get flexibility with automated manufacturing, and thus the "co-bots" which are semi-managed by line workers is the trend.
Table-ized A.I.
*human brains
collaborative robots building a wide range of vehicles on the same line
Until one robot started talking about, well, VIc-K1, which every robot recalled, from HR; otherwise called "Vicky", and said that he went out with her last Thursday. The rest of the team paused and listened. Later there was some arguing, and yelling, machines started making loud sounds, and the cacophony got louder, some accounts mentioned an explosion, triggering several alarms, then the sirens, the firetrucks, even men in protective gear usually seen in hazardous chemical spills
We can write all these stories about AI, Speech synthesis, vertical integration, millions of other buzzwords till the cows come home, but one thing's for sure.
Subject says it all...