A Robot Revolution, Good for Business

As Robots Become Cheaper, Easier to Program, and More Adept at New Tasks, a Wider Range of Companies Are Putting Them to Work

By David Freedman for Mouser Electronics

Published March 2, 2023

Good news for anyone who has ever lost part of a weekend in a tire store waiting for their car’s turn in one of the busy service bays: The time needed to change tires is about to be cut by three-fourths. That’s because robots are learning to do it, thanks to a Detroit startup called RoboTire.

The venture is funded largely by giant tire store chain, Discount Tire, among others, but RoboTire’s robots are expected to find work in tire and automotive shops of all types and sizes eventually. “Just think about all the different vehicle-servicing jobs that robots could do,” says Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a major global trade association counting more than 750 robotics and related organizations among its members.

Robots have been helping build cars since General Motors installed the world’s first industrial robot in 1961. The leap from welding doors on an assembly line to changing tires in a local shop is a vast one, however, given the multiple, highly variable steps involved in swapping tires on whatever vehicle pulls into the bay—not to mention the difference in economic scale between a massive factory and a tire store.

This use case is only one small example of the thousands of ways robotics and related industrial automation technology are starting to affect manufacturing and even service businesses of all sizes and types around the world. “Whether it’s for assembling products, boxing goods for shipment, or cleaning up a restaurant kitchen, the need for robots is growing,” says Juan Aparicio, vice president of product at robotics software developer Ready Robotics and a former head of advanced manufacturing automation at Siemens.

Job Creators, Not Killers

Orders for robots from companies across North America climbed to nearly 30,000 in just the first three quarters of 2021. That’s about $1.5 billion in robots, representing an increase of approximately 50 percent over 2020 robot sales for the same time period. What’s more, for the first time ever, orders for robots from outside the automotive industry jumped above orders from automobile companies, making up two-thirds of all orders.

The shift to more wide-ranging applications for industrial robots is only accelerating. Boosting that shift are two trends that hit hard in 2021: a shortage of labor across industries (more than 4 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in August 2021 alone) and a global supply chain crunch driving companies to step up local manufacturing capacity.

Figure 1: Labor shortages, supply-chain crunches, and growing online sales have sent demand soaring for robots that can help with shipping logistics (Source: FUN FUN PHOTO / Stock.Adobe.com)

That’s why experts predict that the robot surge will continue, with robots taking over as many as 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world this decade, with each deployed robot replacing 1.5 human workers on average. There’s a happy catch, however: The same experts generally agree that the productivity boost companies derive from robots will propel job creation so that the net effect of the coming robot revolution will be an increase in hiring. “Robot orders are surging, but employment is at historic lows, so robots obviously aren’t job-killers,” says Burnstein. “They’ll mostly be doing the repetitive, unsafe jobs people don’t want to do and creating better jobs for people.”

That said, industrial robots will need some key advances to catch on fully. For starters, they will have to become easier to program. Automotive companies and such giants as Amazon and FedEx can afford to hire hundreds of robotics programming specialists, but most companies could not attract or afford that sort of scarce, highly specialized expertise.

The robotics industry is responding by developing robotics control software that can be more quickly mastered by anyone with run-of-the-mill computer expertise. “Programming robots has been half science and half artistry,” says Rick Brookshire, director of product management and development for Epson Robots, a major producer of industrial robots. “That’s why it would take a company months to implement a robotics solution. But now we’re providing application programming platforms that make it easy for a company to get a robot up and running in days.”

Making industrial robots easier and faster to set up helps open them up to a world of new applications, says Ready Robotics’ Aparicio. He notes that complex programming is fine for robots that are going to perform the same task for years or for applications that can be used across hundreds of installations, such as a robot that operates a deep fryer.

Most companies want a robot they can easily set up for a unique task, however, and then reprogram for other tasks later—a requirement that Ready Robotics, among other companies, is addressing with easy-to-use application-development tools that sit on top of more complicated programming environments. “We need to remove the barrier to entry for robot programming,” says Aparicio. “Even if you don’t know anything about robots, if you know how to program a web app, you should be able to set up a robot.”

Seeing and Feeling

Even as robot programming becomes easier, the tasks assigned to robots are becoming more difficult. That’s particularly true with robots becoming common in electronics and biomedical production, says Epson’s Brookshire. “As components in products like computer hard drives, hearing aids, and DNA testing get smaller and smaller, the precision requirements for robots to manipulate the parts are getting more and more challenging,” he says. Whereas conventional robots have to be accurate to tenths of an inch, he notes, the robots handling these more precise tasks have to pin any variance in their motion down to as little as ten-thousandths of an inch.

Not only that, but these more demanding tasks no longer have the luxury of being able to repeat the exact same motion in the exact same place. Whereas conventional robots have usually been placed on assembly lines to manipulate parts that roll by in consistent positions, today’s robots often have to pick up dozens of components that may vary in position or orientation in unpredictable ways. Meanwhile, the mobile stock-picking robots that are becoming increasingly common at Amazon and other warehouses not only need to avoid objects in their path as they travel but must also be able to grab packages that come in any number of shapes, sizes, and positions.

Figure 2: The small parts and ultra-fine features of electronics products has driven the need for robots that operate with more and more precision (Source: xiaoliangge/Stock.Adobe.com)

To cope, robots are now frequently equipped with one or more cameras to identify components and their positioning as well as the robots’ surroundings. They are also equipped with “force sensors” on their grippers that provide something akin to a sense of touch so the robots can “feel” whether they are grasping an item the right way. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated “motion planning” software is guiding robots’ wheels, arms, and grippers in response to visual and tactile feedback. “In the past, the goal was to automate the known,” says Aparicio. “Now we’re automating the unknown.”

Machine learning, computer vision, and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming essential to these sorts of capabilities and are fast pushing the boundaries of what robots can accomplish. “Robots are getting smarter, and that means they’re able to do a better job of recognizing what’s in front of them,” says Burnstein. At the same time, he adds, speech processing and other AI-driven advances are bringing robots closer to the day when setting them up for a task merely requires asking them to do it in plain English—although that capability may still be a decade or more away.

Long limited to larger manufacturing companies, robots are now pushing down into small businesses. Not only are robots becoming easier to set up and program, but their purchase price has been dropping steadily. Whereas it once cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring even a single robot into a company, today a company can add an industrial robot for well under $10,000. Epson’s lowest-end robot costs as little as $7,500, notes Brookshire.

Just as important, the ability to perform different tasks on the fly changes the economic equation. Whereas cost-justifying a robot at a giant manufacturer might require runs of tens of thousands of a single product at a time, small companies typically need a robot that can cost-effectively work on an order of just dozens of units before switching to a different run. “As lot sizes shrink and product variety grows, the ability to have the robot immediately accommodate the change makes all the difference,” says Brookshire. Even better, some robotics companies are talking about doing away with up-front and ownership costs altogether, instead providing robots as a service, with businesses paying through some combination of monthly and per-task fees.

Robotic Coworkers

That still leaves a question hanging over the robotics industry: Can robots work alongside human workers instead of remaining at stations or along paths that are fenced off for safety, as has long been the standard? The notion of such collaborative robots, or “cobots,” is a tantalizing one, and robotics vendors are working hard to provide the hardware and software safety features that can sufficiently reduce the risk of accidents to make it a reality. Robots, for example, can be programmed to freeze when they detect a human close by.

Figure 3: Most robots today can't safely work closely alongside human workers, but over time new safeguards and better training of workers will make human-robot collaboration common (Source: Zoran Mircetic/Stock.Adobe.com)

The experts caution against moving too quickly in mixing people and robots, however. “No robot can provide perfect safety by itself,” says Aparicio. “A lot of it comes down to properly training the people around them.”

Some day in the not-too-distant future, robots will comfortably share tasks, tools, and workbenches with their human coworkers, perhaps even while chatting them up. For now, though, they will need to have the service bay to themselves when they change your tires.