Robots vs Manual Labour: Cost & Efficiency Comparison

For a lot of 'manual work' of the horse-power man-power type, I'd expect these exo-skeleton 'robots' to be more useful for the lifting, shifting, carrying, style of manual labour, especially in 'housing'.

Puts me in mind of the Power Loader operated by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien 2... 

I avoided mention that  (and The Matrix #n)

I don't think it's answerable without doing a cost/benefit analysis once you know exactly what the task is.

For multinational companies, the answer may be to outsource it to a country where labour is cheaper than robots.

hi Antonio Leone the IET robotics and mechatronics Neywork contributed to a guide to implementing industrial robotics recently. This was done in collaboration with the MTC, Irish Manufacuring research & Automate-UK.

Section 3 talks to the benefits, pitfalls & business case. I will be giving a talk on the guide with Coventry LN on 22-Apr at 1900 Utc. I'll add an event link to this thread later.

www.automate-uk.com/.../

#Robotics

I'm confused, are we saying there's still major manufacturing around that doesn't use automated processes???? (Feel like I've dropped into a timewarp and gone back many years!)

Personally I find the more interesting question to be that now manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared due to automation, what are we going to do with all the people who used to work in manufacturing? Which is the huge political question world wide (for example, heavily relates to the rise of the far right in many countries)...but somewhat outside the IET's remit.

Antonio Leone said:

Considering that human have the brain, and they should use it, what do you think about the industrial automation investment?

So it's a related point, are jobs there for the benefit of the workers or for the business? In order to save a UK business form being relocated overseas, I spent several years working on a lean manufacturing turnaround project for small batch electronic products. One of our big areas was to improve production quality (partly through automation) and to both reduce test time and increase test coverage (entirely through automation). The problem was that this made the skilled test engineers roles redundant - previously they had fixed faulty units, now there were fewer faulty units to fix, and in any case the time they spent fixing faults cost more than the cost of they board the were fixing. The test engineers were furious that their brain power was no longer needed, but it had resulted in us producing better quality and cheaper products. (P.S. we did work to try to redeploy them in other technical roles as our whole aim was most definitely NOT to lose people from the business if we could avoid it.)

Having to make those decisions was a real eye-opener for me. I think it's worth remembering that manufacturing roles are artificial - they were created through advances in engineering, and so may be (and are being) removed through further advances in engineering. It's a massive societal problem in the UK, and has been for the last 50 years. But sadly for individual manufacturing engineers, trying to hold back from late 20th century (let alone 21st century) developments doesn't save jobs or use of the brains in the medium term...as the business is likely to fold anyway. As indeed happened to the company where I did my undergrad apprenticeship which folded in 1982! 

Andy Millar said:

Personally I find the more interesting question to be that now manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared due to automation, what are we going to do with all the people who used to work in manufacturing?

That question is arguably a few decades too late. 

My grandmother was of the generation where there was no widespread automation. But early in her career, the factory was automated and most people lost their jobs. My grandmother was one of the few kept on to help run the machines. This was sometime post war, probably 1950s.

So the question is, how did society change back then and does it have implications for any further changes. But I agree, most major manufacturing I expect to already be utilising robotic labour.

This post looks a little click-bait to me.

are we saying there's still major manufacturing around that doesn't use automated processes?

There are a couple of series on TV that go into various factories and I'm often surprised by what has and hasn't been automated - in some you see an almost totally automated production line that then feeds people who manually put the things into packaging or manually stack the boxes on a palette - which I would have thought would have been one of the simpler tasks to automate. Likewise output from one very clever machine is sometimes dumped into a bucket then pushed on a trolley by a human to  the hopper of the next very clever machine. In others you sill automated conveyor systems supplying workstations where people work with screwdrivers and hammers. In some cases the human input is a selling point (e.g. "quality hand finished") regardless of the economics of the actual process.

(Puts me in mind of the old Not the Nine o'Clock News sketch of a British Leyland assembly line .... "built by Roberts").

   - Andy.