The much we're hearing live in media today is robotic systems replace jobs or cause people to lose work. Let's take a case study. Look at the West Coast back in, I'm going to give my time periods drawn, let's say, look at the West Coast back in the 30's and 40's, their everything was manually done. They had thousands and thousands of people, but over a period of time they started automating with cranes, and these large automated cranes were doing unloading. But, what happened is they allowed our shipping industry to grow, they allowed the industry to grow much more because we could do more work and take more work, so more products could come in. You didn't have simple constraints. It's the same thing with automation robotics. So, whenever we look at robotics, we always focus on the 3D's; dull, dangerous, and dirty. I usually like throw a fourth D in there, demanding, especially when we talk ergonomics. There's a lot of jobs people just don't want to do, really they just hate doing that could cause them ergonomic issues. Somebody with a electric screwdriver in a hand putting the screws all day twisting the wrists, these are jobs that over time will cause medical issues, these are good advocates for robotic systems, there's applications for robotics don't have necessarily the entire skill set or effect for affordable enough to do the entire main assembly process, where you still need these labor to work with the robot to complete assemblies. We have a local company here who assembles electronics, they understood that the robot couldn't do everything, and the people could be assisted augmenting them in a way. In all honesty, there may be some point in the future, a couple of jobs here and there they'll replace but then the company is more productive, it grows, it hires more people, because it can be more productive, it can meet the world demand, they can meet the cost of competitiveness with their competition. So robot are technology for growth, and let's not dismiss them, it's not the end of the world. There's other examples, take a look at the welding workforce, year after year after year of attending a welding seminars, the American welding society has said same thing, "The welding workforce is dwindling, nobody wants to do welding anymore, it's just non acceptable tests your skill that people want to take on." So what do you do about that? How do you, things still need to be welded together and they're still a lot of parts need producing, as those parts are increasing as our human race expands. So, what do you do? Well, you have to have a way to fill in that need, where there are shortages of people, where you have shortages of certain skilled labor you have to have a need to back fill them. Then now we're not making just people skilled labor, we are actually elevating them, so now they're not just doing welding but they're running a robotic welding system, where you don't necessarily need the skilled labor but you're also educating them, you making them more capable to work in today's manufacturing environment. Most people perform tasks at speeds ranging from 500 millimeters per second to about 1.5 meters per second. If collaborative robots are going to be useful they need to be able to move at similar speeds. Replacing a person with a robot that can only work half as quickly is not attractive. Here you see a 4-year-old junior robot tester stopping one of our collaborative robots from a speed of 1.5 meters per second, the robot stops in a few millimeters and the tester is not harmed in any way. This demonstrates how good mechanical design combined with sophisticated control algorithms can allow collaborative robots to move at speeds equivalent to people while still being safe if they bump into people. To summarize this lesson, we learned how to minimize the moving mass of both the robot and the end effector through selecting a robot that is appropriately sized for the payload and designing lightweight end effectors for small payloads. How to determine when to consider a robot with low ratio drives rather than high ratio drives in order to minimize reflected inertia, which can add many kilograms of effective mass at the working radius of the robot. We learned the value of control algorithms that limit the motor torque in the event of a collision, we learned to minimize sharp edges and add compliance where possible on robots end efectors and fixtures.
