Word: robotical
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Leaders in the robot industry claim that the main resistance to their inventions comes not from union labor but from management. "We are thrusting ourselves into the manufacturing area, and it's a very conservative place," says Joseph Engelberger, the ebullient president of Unimation. Top executives turn for advice to their technical managers, and these are naturally cautious. "Plant supervisors get worried because they don't understand robots," says Neale Clapp, a robotics expert for the management consultant firm of Block Petrella Associates in Plainfield, N.J. "They feel their authority is undermined." G.E., for one, commissioned a psychologist...
...this, the robot backers offer two answers. One uses the hard language of survival. "If we don't go to robots," says an expert at Carnegie-Mellon, "we'll just continue to lose to Japan and West Germany. Our economy won't grow, and there won't be any new jobs. New jobs have always come from new technology." The other answer is a gentler prophecy of benefits to come...
...everyone, of course, is so euphoric about the coming robot age. Brian Carlisle, Unimation's general manager for West Coast research, warns that "we're a long way from a robot that can assemble a carburetor." Nor are robots a panacea for all the ills that industry is heir to. The most automated factory of its time was the Lordstown plant that GM designed to produce the unsuccessful Vega, evidence that productivity is not worth much if the product is hard to sell. As the robotmakers look ahead, though, they see a promised land. It is a land...
...assembly systems will use robot technology...
Outside the factory and the lab, the work that needs to be done in this world is almost without limits, and so is the robot's potential ability to do it. In the field of farming and food processing, for example, Unimation has been asked to design a robot that can pluck chickens. Australian technicians are already testing robots to shear sheep. One machine first stuns the animal with an electric shock, then closes in with its shears. Clipping the back and sides is not too hard, but the technicians still report "significant difficulties" in finishing up the neck...