Word: robotical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...noisy inferno at Westinghouse's lamp factory in Bloomfield, N.J., a Unimate 2015G robot performs a process called "swaging." This is somewhat like making spaghetti, but it is done with 21-in. rods of yellow tungsten, destined to become light-bulb filaments. The robot lifts them off a conveyor belt and sticks them into a blazing furnace (3,200° F), then into a swaging machine that stretches the rods until they have grown to 37 in. in length and shrunk to exactly .467 in. in diameter. Three workers, each of whom cost the company $20,000 per year...
...Faichney Drive in Watertown, N.Y., a Unimation Mark II is in charge of the delicate task of removing any air bubbles that may remain in the mercury inside a thermometer. Established in an isolated room, because of the increased awareness of the dangers of mercury poisoning, the robot takes a boxful
This sense of the robot as a helper rather than a menace is widespread among factory hands. Though robots are highly vulnerable to sabotage, there has been no trace of the Luddite violence that threatened the first labor-saving machines of the Industrial Revolution. On the contrary, working with a robot seems to confer status. And, while the machine usually looks less like a man than like a lobster, its human partners often seem unable to resist giving it a name and even lavishing on it a certain metallic affection. When one machine known as "Clyde the Claw" broke down...
...willingness of the robot to do the dirty work, like some mechanized Turkish Gastarbeiter, has muted alarms about the loss of jobs and has kept the labor unions mostly at bay. Welding cars and spraying paint are stupefying jobs, and, besides, they are ideally done at temperatures hotter than a worker can stand. "In the next five years," says Anthony Massaro, Westinghouse's chief of robotics technology, "we're going to lose 25,000 people in manufacturing due to attrition, and there's no way to replace them all. People joining the labor force these days...
Robert Cannon, president of an electrical workers local that represents many Westinghouse workers in New Jersey, accepts that reasoning. "Frankly, I welcome it," he says. "If we can bring in a robot here to do, say, the painting that a man does for $7, then we can move him to another job at $7.50 an hour. We say, 'Train our people for the skilled jobs that are in today's market...