Toyota to Employ Advanced Robots 360
olegalexandrov writes "Toyota Motor will introduce robots which can work as well or better than humans at all 12 of its factories in Japan to cut costs and deal with a looming labor shortage. The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese laborers, a report said on Thursday." The Motley Fool has a humorous take, and Toyota emphasizes that goodlife, err, humans will continue to have a place in Toyota factories.
Re:Strange New War? (Score:3, Informative)
Again not "and correct", but rather "and NOT correct".
I am very, very sorry for that typo. This is a very good reason
Re:here's a link to a wsj from aug 4, 2004 about (Score:3, Informative)
Its a link for non-subscribers(took some digging to find this article but thanks to copernic.)
WSJ.com - As Toyota Closes In on GM, Quality Concerns Also Grow [clickability.com]
Re:looming (Score:5, Informative)
I think that ``looming labor shortage'' refers to their looming demographic crisis [foreignaffairs.org].
Japan's population is aging fast. They're getting older at the rate of one year per year, of course, but they aren't breeding fast enough to replace themselves. That's going to have lots of effects on Japan, most of them bad. One of those bad effects will be a labor shortage. You see, the number of people who are both willing and physically able to work is going to fall off as the current generation of workers gets too old to work.
Europe is facing the same problem, and they're dealing with it via gastarbeiters [google.com]. Apparently, Japan is going to deal with it using robots.
Re:Why only two arms? (Score:3, Informative)
Most manufacturing arms ar stationary devices that move product from an inventory state to a place in a production state. (from a pile of parts onto the object being assembled)
If these "two armed robots" are also able to do more than transition product from point a to point b - but say can pickup and maipulate the assembled object, retreive additional parts from shelving, or reposition themselves so they have access to the assembled object so that they can put on a different part than just one - it will allow them to be "more efficient".
This is due to the fact that they can accomplish the same task in a smaller space with less robots. One armed stationary devices only have a limited window to the line, and can only place (typically) one part - meaning that the line be long and have lots of robots.
Industrial Robots (Score:3, Informative)
Building anthropomorphic robots for an assembly line is (in this engineers opinion) inefficient. The tool should be matched to do the job specifically at had. Hell, Toyota was one of the companies that started the buzz in Lean Manufacturing. [optiprise.com]
I work with robots. Robots are my friends. You, sir, are no robot. Wait, I mean you, sir, are not thinking of the right robot.
Re:looming (Score:3, Informative)
The rejection of guest workers is a carefully considered policy in Japan. There are some disadvantages to losing a common culture, as the Dutch [bbc.co.uk], the Germans [dw-world.de], and the French [arabnews.com] are discovering. Can't say I blame the aging Japanese for not wanting to deal with cultural strife or learn Tagolog or Mandarin in their dotage. But pardon me, I'm off to my Spanish class...