Robot lasts 6-7 years under typical duty cycles (per FANUC). Think how an EV is cheaper over its lifetime to operate vs a combustion vehicle, capex vs opex. Price of labor will continue to increase in the future due to structural demographics. And lets be real, Amazon warehouse jobs are not good jobs and terribly hard on the human body. No one yearns for the Amazon mines. These are jobs that should absolutely be automated.
Oh yeah I agree with what you're saying, and of course they're working on this because they think it makes sense to do so, I just figure it's still a tricky sell even to replace $20/h humans.
FWIW I design industrial equipment for meat processing plants, where you'd be lucky to get 6-7 months out of a robot arm. I wish it was affordable to use robotics there, because there's a lot that could be done to eliminate some truly awful jobs.
What are the key contributors to reduced robotic longevity, both environmental and duty cycle? How can the robot last longer in harsh environments and aggressive duty cycles?
High pressure hot washdown followed by cold temperatures is kind of a nightmare scenario for equipment. Also some of the plants use cleaning chemicals that will strip off paint and anodizing. The cleaning crews are poorly paid and poorly treated, so they're not going to be careful with equipment, which means you get damage to wiring and sensors from pressure washers.
On the maintenance side, technicians just have too much going on, and it's rare to find someone who has robotic-equipment-level skills. Of all the plants I've been to, I can think of only a couple that are suitable for that level of sophisticated automation. The rest would be SOL if their robot went offline, and we wouldn't be able to train them past that point.
I think for this to work, either the company running the plant needs to own the system and set up specific training and tasks to care for it, or it needs to be provided near-constant support from the manufacturer.
I think you can buy stainless robots that might be good for this sort of thing, but I've never looked into it much because we have a hard enough time supporting our much more basic products.
Actually it's pretty expensive in the long run. They want raises, are finicky about their health, have pesky habits like going home, having life partners and something silly called work/life balance. Also, they sometimes organize and become collective bodies under something called a union.
In reality, I'm a strong supporter of everything above. Maybe we can really provide people better jobs by delegating repetitive and boring things to machines and allow everyone to do something they enjoy to earn their lives.
If you have the misfortune to be in a developed country (not the USA) then yes. Worker without rights are evidently pretty cheap. They go home, but you can just get twice as many. Catastrophic self-organization happens on scales comparable to robot crashes, and you can just recycle the offending units and replace them with new ones.
Depends on how they're built, and building them takes experience. Plus, if their MTBF is long enough with enough hot spares, you can rotate the problematic ones out fix them while they are being replaced from the hot-spares pool.
When you are not budget constrained, and building things for businesses, a little overengineering goes a long way.
I have a Xerox 7500DN color laser printer next to me, and it's working for more than 20 years at this point. It has gone through a lot of spares, but most (if not all) issues are from parts wearing down naturally. Nothing breaks unexpectedly on that. Same for robots. Give enough design budget, overengineer a little, and that thing will be one hell of an ugly but reliable machinery.
When you work with real "industrial" stuff, the landscape is very different.
All moving parts degrade. A nice thing about machines is you can service and refurbish them to like-new condition.
There are options to deal with your shitty knees, hip, and back, but none of them get you back to 100% of your original capabilities and, carry an element of gambling, and will involve the kinds of painkillers that can ruin you far more comprehensively than a shitty joint will.
Humans are not reliable either. Humans are much more likely to be out sick unexpectedly.
If you keep up the maintenance plan for machines they rarely break before their predicted retirement date when you replace them. And since the maintenance and retirement dates are predicted in advance you can plan for them and thus ensure they happen when you want them to.
These "what if we give everyone jobs they are interested" remarks are just bullshit. You're not going to give people more interesting jobs, the result will just be flooded job markets everywhere. Then more jobs will become automated and people will then flood to more sectors that aren't automated. What a stupid dream, let people have meaningless jobs if they want that.
