If you are managing an industrial facility, you might have many plans on how to improve its efficiency, how to make the work processes more independent, and so on. The thing is that now, there are many technological advances that allow making all the manufacturing processes cheaper, more efficient, and less problematic.
With Progressive Automations products, such as linear actuators, and RPA software, many processes are automated now. While actuators make the robotic arms move, the software is responsible for the actions, their performance and coordination, the analysis of data based on which the actions will be planned and performed.
Thus, let us have a look at those advances that automation and robotics have made available.
Many Processes Can Be Performed by Robots
Just several years ago, automation would be an immensely expensive project. Let alone the equipment and software licenses. For automation implementation, you would need to modify the infrastructure of your premises completely. You would need to hire a team of specialists to code all the robots, and similar.
It is clear that not all companies could afford such expenses disregarding the promise that all the costs would pay off rather fast.
Now, however, with new advancements and solutions, sacrifices aren’t needed. The new technologies can be implemented on top of the existing infrastructure. No coding is needed. There are many other options to make them work as you need.
One of such ways to teach robots work is called Programming by Demonstration. A human specialist basically guides the robot arm to make the needed movement. This information is recorded by software and transformed into a specific program. No coding or programming is needed. Moreover, this way enables robots to act in the most accurate way.
With time, it is expected that robots will be able to learn from their errors and move with even higher accuracy.
Collaboration is one more crucial factor that might change the way robots work. Now, most machines perform their tasks in isolated environments. However, this might be challenging for the manufacturing premises because in such a case, a special space is needed. Now, a trend is evolving to make machines work along with human workers.
For now, though, again, robots can work with people by performing operations consecutively. To enable them working together with people, the following features shall be introduced:
- An ability to recognize the intent of a human worker;
- Voice recognition;
- Gesture recognition.
Now, R&D teams are working on these aspects. Thus, in the closest future, even this will become possible.
Conclusions
Robotics and automation – these are the main trends that are being implemented by most factories. Robots work in hazardous environments or places where human health would be endangered. Machines are able to perform many operations more accurately and efficiently. Work is becoming much cheaper, the productivity boosts, the risks for human workers are reduced.
These trends are highly positive. They enable people to devote themselves to more creative tasks. However, robots cannot replace human workers, at least for now.
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