The Auto Plants of the Future May Have a Surprisingly Human Touch (reuters.com) 38
Carmakers have big plans for their next generation of factories: smarter designs, artificial intelligence and collaborative robots building a wide range of vehicles on the same line. From a report: The plants will also feature a component they say is the secret ingredient to flexible manufacturing: humans. SAIC-GM's factory in Shanghai, which opened in 2016, is one of the world's most advanced auto plants, assembling Buick minivans and Cadillac sedans and SUVs, including the CT-6 plug-in hybrid for U.S. consumers. GM's Shanghai plant is expected to eventually produce new electric vehicles, primarily for the Chinese market, executives have said. The plant, which GM operates with Chinese partner SAIC Motor Corp Ltd, feels almost like a scene from a Star Wars film, with battalions of machines quietly working in self-directed harmony. Collaborative robots, or "cobots," painted matte green and unrestrained by the steel cages that surround their larger industrial cousins, are being programmed to work alongside humans on the line. One unusual operation advanced models now handle is installing gears in transmissions.
Re: Eradicate all towelheads (Score:2)
Over the years one thing I've seen over and over is the huge difference having a few good people at the right time and place makes. It's often occured to me that you could excel at anything by just trying a little harder than other guy does to find good people. So the idea of a highly automated factory that also cleverly leverages human potential sounded plausible to me.
But your post human potential has a downside too. The mentality of any group collectively never rises far above its least common denomina
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Perfect, let's spend two years and several times the amount of money on a printed car than on a manufactured car :p
Human Compatible Robots (Score:2)
Since no one probably RTFA and it wasn't mentioned, what this means is robots that are sensitive to impacts outside their programmed maneuvers and can avoid stupid humans getting in the way.
So if a robot encounters resistance where it's not expected, it stops. It's the same kind of response that you see with the table saws these days that detect your finger touching the blade and stops it before you get cut.
I believe they also incorporate heat sensors and other sensors to detect people and can predict when
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There is always a Big Future (Score:2)
In Robot repair and maintenance!
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Q: Who will repair the repair robots?
A: It's no use, it's robots all the way down!
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But when the humans break, you just throw them out.
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Just as Ford gives up on making cars (Score:2)
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Are we great yet?
GM still makes more cars in Lordstown every month than Tesla makes in a year.
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"Hopefully it will help Ford make trucks and SUVs."
Since Ford will make only 2 sedans, I guess that's what they mean with "building a wide range of vehicles on the same line."
The robots have a surprisingly human touch? (Score:2)
I love how this story is all feel-good "we need humans in factories after all," but it never describes one single job that a human is required to do. They tell us that automation can't replace critical thinking -- O RLY? "People do the work requiring dexterity and intelligence," it says. Yeah, like humans have more "dexterity" than a robot and nobody has ever automated a process requiring intelligence before. And the rest of the story describes visions of "battalions" of robots, hundreds of robots, even rob
Transmission Install (Score:2)
I'm not sure why the poster thought that installing gears in a transmission was an odd thing for robots to do. With today's insanely complex 8 and 10 speed automatic transmissions, I don't want some high school dropout who's hungover from the night before putting my next transmission together for me!
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They're just two old school 3 speeds stacked front to back.
Change in market (Score:2)
Because cars last longer these days, the poor and lower middle class mostly buy used cars. The wealthy want new, of course. This means manufacturers who better cater to the finicky tastes of the wealthy get the sale.
Cranking out the same model in large quantities as cheap as possible is no longer a competitive strategy because the poor buy used and the rich don't want generic cars. But it's hard to get flexibility with automated manufacturing, and thus the "co-bots" which are semi-managed by line workers is
Humans (Score:2)
*human brains