On April 4, 2018, Robotics Business Review issued the following post:
With flexible task options and ability to safely work alongside humans, collaborative robots are joining the workforce.
Credit: KUKA AG
Unlike their industrial automation cousins, collaborative robots, aka cobots, aren’t limited to safety cages or automotive production lines. Rather, they’re likely to be a robot co-worker with your human employees. This growing area of robotics promises to help small and midsize companies in several industries, ranging from healthcare to packaging and even food preparation.
Businesses looking to augment their existing human workforce, increase throughput, and even bring back operations from offshore, can benefit from cobots. These new types of robots can perform several tasks, including high-volume palletizing and de-palletizing of cases, bags and bottles in tight workspaces; deliver several packages, tools and other items from one location to another; and pack bins and other sorting tasks.
In this whitepaper, author Phil Britt looks at the rise of the cobots and how they’ve evolved over the past 10 years. With a predicted market size of $4.28 billion by 2023, it’s clear that cobots have a place within several companies to help human workers become more efficient, accurate and safer in the workplace.
The report gives an update on seven top companies in the cobot space, showing how supply chain and manufacturing organizations can see new applications and recent success stories of their cobots.
To grab a copy of the report, fill out the form at the link below.
Gary Reber Comments:
As robotic “machines” increasingly become employed in production, there will be new AI-related job opportunities but the non-human machine robotic and AI implementation overall will significantly eliminate the necessity for masses of human labor. While the national focus is always on job creation instead of ownership creation, our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital “worker” owner (“IT machines”) more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success –– always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent is not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the goods, products, and services produced as a result of substituting “machines” for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption made possible by “customers with money.”
