Robot as Maker

  |  Command Line Heroes Team   Storia della tecnologia

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Robot as Maker | Command Line Heroes

About the episode

One of the first functional robots appeared on TV in 1966. That’s earlier than some of us expect. The Unimate’s televised premiere sparked the world’s imagination. It represented a host of possibilities. Those possibilities, however, also implied a coming competition that would last for decades.

Dag Spicer tells the story of the Unimate, the first industrial robot—and how little the American public trusted it. But that distrust wasn’t universal. Tomonori Sanada explains how the Unimate was received very differently in Japan. Joe Campbell describes the dangers of working alongside industrial robots. But he’s working to change that with cobots. And Paul Shoup shares how his company, employees, and customers are benefiting from cobots.

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It's 1966. Americans are curling up on their sofas, ready to watch another episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Only this time, it isn't some movie star or politician who arrives for an interview. It's a hulking robotic arm, about the size of a small car. Its name is Unimate. This is Unimate's television debut and the audience is in love. Unimate pours a beer. Unimate plays golf. Unimate conducts Johnny Carson's band. The audience laughs and claps, but they haven't yet imagined what all those precision movements really mean. Unimate is capable of so much more than party tricks. The Unimate robot heralded the dawn of industrial robotics. American factories were already being automated to a certain degree. But this was something new. A programmable robot ready to execute complicated jobs from start to finish. A robot for industry and this it, Unimate. I'm Saron Yitbarek, and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. All season, we're exploring new ways to approach a fundamental question, what is a robot? In this episode we ask—is a robot a factory worker? Today, almost three million robots work at factories around the world. The world's largest companies each employ hundreds of thousands of robots, and those numbers are bound to multiply in the near future. So exactly how much space should we make for our new robot coworkers? What's the best way to ensure that robots protect and support the humans they work with? How you answered that question depends on where and when you ask it. And to understand those dynamics, we have to begin by understanding the origin of industrial robotics itself—because the story of Unimate and its first few factory jobs is also the story of robots and humans struggling to work better together. After the Second World War, American households began filling up with fantastic new devices: vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, toasters. Every advertisement promised a new world of ease and speed. And an inventor called George Devol believed the revolution and American households belonged in American factories too. Devol was the inventor of the barcode and the automatic door. He was all about automating away human labor, speeding things up. For example, he developed one of the first microwave oven products that was called the Speedy Weeny, which automatically cooked and dispensed hotdogs. That's Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum. Spicer described for us an inventor who had a really fundamental impact on robotics. He came up with this idea of what he called universal automation, which is some form of automation that could be applied to controlling these processes in factories, but automation that would be adaptable. That is, it could change or be programmable. Devol had been nine-years-old when the term robot was first coined in the sci-fi play called Rossum's Universal Robots. And now he was on the verge of making that fantasy into a reality. He would build a true universal robot. He actually embodied all that in the Unimate robot, and that was really his greatest hit. All robots in the world owe part of their DNA to the Unimate. The Unimate. This was a 4,000 pound, 10-foot by 20-foot behemoth. Not humanoid at all. Instead, it was mainly composed of one giant arm powered by hydraulics with a magnetic drum memory where commands could be saved. When Devol took out a patent for his new invention, he didn't even call it a robot. The patent was for a process called Programmed Article Transfer, which is just about the most boring way you can describe a robot. But Devol wasn't a salesman. He wasn't a hype guy. That job belonged to Devol's new partner, Joseph Engelberger, who came on board and worked to market Unimate to America's factory owners. Their best bet was to convince factories dealing with heavy and dangerous work that Unimate could take over where humans struggle. And after 40 companies turned them down, one finally said, yes. The first Unimate was shipped off to a General Motors plant in Trenton, New Jersey in 1961. The workers there, yeah, they weren't too worried. They thought, initially, it was just going to fail. This was two years before that Johnny Carson appearance. And while there was a bit of automation on the factory floor, nobody put much stock in a robot's ability to replace a human. Their initial perception was perhaps less of it being a threat than it being more of a kind of crazy idea that was probably not going to work and that they would have the last laugh. And yet almost immediately Unimate proved itself. The robot was sent to work on hot die casting. It was lifting red, hot metal and carrying it to the cooling liquid. Super dangerous work and a job that factory workers would have been more than happy to hand over. Soon enough, there were 450 die casting robots working at GM plants across the country. It was sort of the opening salvo of automation onto the assembly line. What few understood was that automobile production had just been changed forever and soon everything else would transform too. Robots would speed up production, taking over dangerous and repetitive labor. America had a head start in what will become a global factory war. But where American companies failed to truly understand the potential of Unimate, Japanese companies did not. They saw the arrival of Unimate in the U.S. and thought, "We need to get in on this." The Japanese were hungry for any edge they could get as they rebuilt their economy after World War II. They saw Unimate and thought, "Universal automation. This is going to change everything." By 1967, Japan had acquired a license from Unimation Inc. to start building Unimates of their own. My name is Tomonori Sanada and I'm working for Kawasaki Heavy Industries. I'm head of marketing and business planning of Robot Division. Kawasaki was one of the Japanese companies that licensed Unimate technology, and Sanada explained to us why Japan was so much more willing to embrace robots than America had been. In Japan, we have the culture, you know, everything has a soul. We call it animism. So our ancestors have been praying to a stone or tree, so Japanese people think that robots also have a soul. So that's why Japanese people are more comfortable to work with robot. The idea that robots had souls made them less threatening, more like collaborators. But there was also a practical reason for Japan's enthusiasm. They had a massive labor shortage. In the 1960s, our population is getting old and we had a very low birthrate. So in the manufacturing industry, we didn't have enough people to work in the factory. So robots were the good solution to compensate for the lack of labor. With this combination of cultural openness and economic need, Japan threw itself into robotics development. Within a few years, Japan was installing more robots than any other country. They perfected the technology, improved it, and then started exporting robots around the world. Today, Japanese companies like Fanuc, Yaskawa, and of course Kawasaki, are global leaders in industrial robotics. It was a very good decision to, you know, introduce robots in 1960s and we could become competitive in the international market. Meanwhile, back in America, some companies were beginning to realize what they'd missed. American auto workers were protesting the introduction of robots, fearing job losses. There were strikes, there was vandalism. Some robots were actually being sabotaged on the factory floor. The cultural reception was very different. Instead of seeing robots as partners, American workers often saw them as threats. But this wasn't necessarily the workers' fault. The way robots were being introduced in American factories was often adversarial. Robots were big, dangerous, and they were clearly designed to replace humans rather than work with them. They were surrounded by safety cages and barriers. The message was clear: robots work here, humans stay out. These early industrial robots were indeed powerful and precise, but they were also potentially lethal. If you got in the way of a robot arm moving a 2,000-pound car part, well, that robot wasn't going to notice you were there until it was too late. There's actually a rather morbid Wikipedia page called "List of Robots that have Killed People," and it's actually all industrial robots from the 1980s and 1990s. That's Joe Campbell, senior manager of applications development for Universal Robots North America. Campbell has spent years thinking about how to make robots safer, more collaborative. The industrial robots of the 1980s and 1990s were fast, they were powerful, they were precise, but they were not safe. And so they needed to be kept behind big walls and barriers and safety fences and light curtains and pressure mats and all sorts of safety devices to make sure that they couldn't harm people. This cage-them-up approach to robot safety worked, but it also reinforced the idea that robots and humans were natural enemies. The robots were doing their thing over there, humans were doing their thing over here, and never the twain shall meet. But Campbell and his colleagues at Universal Robots had a different vision. What if we could design robots that were inherently safe? What if we could design robots that could work side by side with people without needing all those safety barriers? This was the beginning of what we now call collaborative robots, or cobots. The idea was to design robots that were not just safe around humans, but actually designed to work with humans. Universal Robots was founded in 2005 with a very specific vision in mind, and that was to create user-friendly robotic arms that could automate processes in production, avoid the limitations of having to have huge safety barriers in barricades and enable robots to work side by side with skilled human operators in a perfectly safe fashion. At the time, that was a radical thought, a very, very tall order. Within five years though, Universal Robots was releasing their first cobots. These were game changers in two important ways. First, like Campbell mentioned, safety. If a cobot is grabbing a package, say, and you get in its way, don't worry. It won't mow you down. It'll gently bump you and then freeze. Safety is part of a cobot's DNA. And the second big thing they offer is ease of programming. On the old factory floor, those mammoth robots weren't just physically intimidating. They were technically intimidating too. Reprogramming a robot was something only a specialist could do. With cobots, all that changes. Our robots are very, very easy to program. It is very common for non-technical types, non-programmers, non-engineers to learn how to program the robot and set it up and deploy it into factories. What we tell people is that if you can think logically, you can learn how to deploy our robot. The result, a safer, easier, more agile relationship where workers can use robots like tools instead of something to fear. Suddenly, you can pair human ingenuity with robotic strength. You can pair human understanding with robotic memory and precision. And because cobots are so much cheaper, every company can level up their factories. In many cases, these are companies, these are five-, eight-, 10-person companies, but they're the real backbone of US manufacturing. Now, companies of every size have a potential supply of not just robotic workers, but robotic co-workers. And that's important, Campbell says, because as Baby Boomers exit the factory floor, companies are having a hard time replacing them. Whichever generation you want to look at, whether it's Millennials or X-ers or Z's or whatever, they have very, very little interest in working in manufacturing. And they definitely don't have any interest in working in the dull, what we call the "three Ds"—dull, dirty, and dangerous—jobs. Universal Robots is experiencing double-digit growth and Campbell attributes that to companies of all sizes coming around to the idea that robots have evolved to suit human needs in a more adaptive way. For me, the real interesting part is this whole acceptance from the small- and medium-sized companies. And so we do not feel any pushback, because I think we have a good part of the solution; and the problems are not going away. The labor challenges are not going away, the quality challenges, the capacity and productivity challenges, are not going away. And we can be a big part of that solution. If you look at humanity over the decades, we constantly aspire to do more with less. I think cobots are a great part of that success formula. Over at DCL, they do third-party logistics. They're shipping packages, warehousing, restocking shops. It's the kind of business that once upon a time might have employed some pretty pushy robots. Today, though, Paul Shoup, Vice President of Operations, says cobots have created a totally different relationship. Far more gentle, much safer. The cobots they've brought in are also much easier to program. It takes about an hour to program and calibrate a machine for the robot to reach, recognize what product is in the tray, and to be able to properly handle that, and place it neatly into the package. So these robots really are working with humans—alongside them. We have three robots. They are positioned near the employee entrance. And the way Shoup sees it, this collaborative workplace allows every human to benefit. Our goal is not to eliminate the headcount of our team members, just to increase the quality of our goods. It's a vision of a hybrid workforce. One where robots are doing what they do best and humans are seeing their work lives made safer and easier. But listen, I don't want to be overly optimistic here. We have a long way to go before humans and robots can shake hands on the factory floor. And we know that some industrial robots are still making life hard for their human coworkers. But considered this, advocates for cobots argue that they revitalized automakers like Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Today, cobots are the fastest growing part of industrial automation. A human robot hybrid workforce is not just more powerful either. It's also more adaptable. Imagine a factory that uses the strength of machines and the creativity of humans to constantly adapt their work. Maybe pivoting from cars to medical equipment and back to cars, depending on what's needed. The more robotics advances, the more we can bring smart collaboration into manufacturing. Japan found a way to thrive alongside their robots, and they became global leaders as a result. Every country has the potential to build their own relationship with robots. And what do those new factory floors look like? How human? How robotic? There won't be any one answer because we're on the cusp of designing a hundred new ways of working together. Some believe that robots and humans are moving toward a balance where both sides get to do what they do best. Humans and robots leaning into their own special characteristics. However… Oh my goodness. Hello, Sophia. Hello, Jimmy. Wow. In 2018, half a century after the hulking Unimate appeared on The Tonight Show, a very different robot stepped onto the stage, a humanoid robot called Sophia. She and Jimmy Fallon sang a song together. They had some laughs. If Unimate was a sign that robots can enter the workplace, then Sophia was a sign they could, well, enter our hearts. Next time, we explore that leap forward for robotics—the drive to build robot companions. We're discovering what it means when robots emulate the humans who built them. Until then, I'm Saron Yitbarek and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. Keep on coding.

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Command Line Heroes

During its run from 2018 to 2022, Command Line Heroes shared the epic true stories of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels, and how they revolutionized the technology landscape. Relive our journey through tech history, and use #CommandLinePod to share your favorite episodes.