befriend a robot

Robots are changing! For a country with a large population, this proposition is somewhat worrying - a lot of people are going to be taken away from their jobs, right?

However, whether to use people or machines is not a single-choice question. Taking Foxconn as an example, the manufacturing giant announced an ambitious "million robots" plan in the early years, but today, the number of robots used is only about 100,000, because it is difficult for robots to flexibly adapt to the complex zero-scale robots in the 3C industry. If there is a defective product in the production process, the entire robot production line will be forced to stop production, and skilled workers will be required to find problems and adjust parameters - you see, in front of robots, humans still have irreplaceable advantages.

Interactive topic: Have you been robbed of your job by a robot?

For Chinese companies, unmanned chemical factories are far from a legend. The future factory world will be a world created by humans and robots collaboratively. For a long time, robots will appear on the factory floor as human colleagues, collaborating with people, not taking people's jobs.

"People" are different, how to be friends?

The International Organization for Standardization defines "human-robot collaboration" as the direct cooperation between robots and workers to achieve task goals within a certain working area. Work, people do more creative work with the assistance of robots.

What should a human robot colleague grow into? Don't think too much, industrial robots will never be the big whites in "Super Marines", taking care of your life cutely. In many cases, they may have no value at all, or even have only a few arms. In addition to their normal work, they have to beware of accidentally hurting their human colleagues.

At last year's Industrial Fair, ABB launched the world's first two-arm robot, YuMi, that truly realizes human-robot collaboration. It is also wrapped in soft materials to avoid industrial accidents. KUKA also brought its first 7-axis light-weight human-robot collaborative robot LBRiiwa to China last year. It can realize direct cooperation between humans and robots, as if playing the operator's "third hand" - without the use of safety barriers, it can interact with the operator. members to collaborate directly. Moreover, all iiwa axes have high-performance collision detection and integrated joint torque sensors, which can be easily pushed away and will automatically move away when they hit a person.

Human-machine collaboration didn't start today. Yu Renchong, chief lecturer of Shenzhen Lianshuo Robot Vocational Training Center, said: In the past, the boss found that the workers were very tired, so he would introduce equipment to reduce the burden on the workers. This is called power-assisted equipment. This training center, which was unveiled in March this year, takes the training of robot operators as its mission and has attracted great attention in the industry.

As a robot education expert, in Yu Renchong's eyes, what is the difference between the previous human-machine collaboration and the present? "Intelligent production is to put the process suitable for people on the human side, and the process suitable for machine production on the machine side, that is, the workstation. Therefore, the future factory will definitely be a workstation plus a workstation, plus people, not the original assembly line. I keep plugging in some new devices." How should colleagues of different "people" communicate?

Japan's Fujitsu uses the Internet of Things technology to monitor the entire process of human-machine collaboration, and transmits various data generated in the production process in real time. Even the operation efficiency of robots under the influence of different worker behaviors can be recorded in the case. Through the analysis of these data, enterprises can find better human-machine collaboration models.

Who is resisting robots?

"The manager of the factory is one of the people who reject robots the most." Some media reported this: "For those factory managers and managers, managing people is the most troublesome thing, but it is also their job. The value lies in the fact that once robots come, the demand for managers will be greatly reduced, and they will also have a sense of career crisis." Hearing such a story, Yu Renchong laughed: "This is completely a conspiracy theory, in fact, the factory's Workers are not that complicated, managers are not that complicated, and the loyalty of employees in Chinese enterprises is generally low, and the middle-level enterprises have not yet reached the point of love for enterprises." Yu Renchong has provided robot application guidance to many customers, he I feel that "workers actually welcome robot colleagues." He once participated in a project in Qunguang Group, the world's largest keyboard and mouse OEM manufacturer that introduced optical inspection robots to inspect keyboards, but not all production lines were equipped. Soon, on those production lines that were not equipped with robots, an emotion spread: Why should we do things that machines can do? Play us like monkeys?

Where did the people who were replaced by robots go? "Workers are a scarce resource now. After robots replace people, they will quickly be transferred to other positions." Yu Renchong believes that if workers lose their jobs because of robots, the first thing that enterprises should consider is not robots, but whether management Something went wrong.

For human colleagues, robots are both a challenge and an opportunity. He Wanmin, Vice President of Comau China and General Manager of the Robotics Division, divided the existing corporate people into three major groups. He believes that in the age of robots, top managers need to change only their thinking and strategies, while middle managers may change Status, and their experience can easily become an obstacle, the most benefit is the new generation of employees, for whom the robot age is the greatest opportunity.