DC Velocity - August 2016

www.dcvelocity.com AUGUST 2016 DC VELOCITY 33 they touch another object, the newfangled versions don’t need to be sequestered in safety cages to avoid nasty collisions, as is the case today with industrial robots. Cobots will likely be a less costly investment than their industrial brethren, partly because they will be built more efficiently, and partly because companies can do away with all of the expensive apparatus that came with supporting an industrial robot work force.

In a backgrounder on its website, Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based startup that built Baxter and Sawyer, said its creations “can adapt to real-world variability, change applications quickly, and perform tasks like people do.” The robots can be trained in minutes, and workers can take them “by the wrist” to demonstrate how the task is done, the company said. In contrast to traditional robots that need to be programmed over many hours by an engineer or consultant, virtually anyone can quickly get up to speed on Baxter and Sawyer, the company said. (Rethink Robotics executives declined to be interviewed for this story.) Niezgoda said he was fully versed on Baxter in a day or two, and then set up Sawyer without needing to refer to the instruction manual.

NO ADVANCING ARMIES

Given concerns that advances in artificial intelligence will result in the elimination of peoples’ jobs, it is natural that DC workers in relatively low-skilled occupations would see cobots as threats to their livelihood. Those worries may be overblown, however.

For one, no one expects an
armada of cobots to land
overnight at the doors of
DCs. Of 900 executives sur-
veyed by the material han-
dling industry trade group
MHI for its 2016 annual
industry report, more than
half said robotics use would
grow significantly over the
next five to 10 years, but
nearly three-quarters said
it would take six years or
longer to introduce robotics
into their operations.

Autonomous equipment manufacturers emphasized that robots are designed to perform tasks that humans don’t want to do, or that they shouldn’t be doing. This would free up people to handle more value-added tasks, including the programming and operation of robotics systems as well as managing the robotic fleets, they said. “You could have a force multiplier, with one person marshaling 10 [machines] as opposed to one,” said Jeff Christensen, vice president of products and services for Seegrid Corp., a Pittsburgh-based maker of automated guided vehicles (AGVs).

Aldo Zini, president and CEO of Pittsburgh-based
Aethon Inc., which has sold about 500 autonomous
robots under the “Tug” brand, said his machines
have not led customers to displace their workers and
that their use has improved the value and quality of
human labor. “We’re enabling people to do things
they couldn’t do before,” Zini said. “People have not
been let go. They’ve been redeployed and, in many
cases, it’s enhanced the jobs that they do.”
In addition, the machines help prevent injuries by
reducing the amount of heavy manual work a human
has to perform, Zini said. Most Tugs are
currently used in hospitals. However,
Aethon has expanded into the man-
ufacturing sector, and Zini sees the
DC space as a natural extension of the
company’s growth plans.

Niezgoda of Deutsche Post DHL said the cobots’ flexibility and ease of operation makes them ideal trainees. “We want to enable our workers to supervise the robots, to take them from one task to another, and to adjust them if something isn’t working,” he said. “These robots are capable of doing specific tasks, and our workers are capable of teaching them.”