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The "human touch" revolution is now underway.
At IMTS 2018, like at any industrial trade show, the predominant theme was Industry 4.0. Although Industry 4.0 still has not scaled up to cover a significant percentage of manufacturing setups, its vision of near-total automation-and the promise of resulting cost savings-has clearly captured the industry's imagination.
More importantly, even though the "lights out" factory is still a rare phenomenon, the connected automation technologies that form the backbone of Industry 4.0 are seeing widespread and growing deployment. These technologies also are making important differences in the manufacture of many types of products and, in industries like healthcare, even in the provision of services.
THE ROLE OF ROBOTS
The use of robots in manufacturing has been on the rise since the 1960s, when they were first introduced as part of what technologists call Industry 3.0, defined by programmable logic and advanced manufacturing. Robots grew up in the car industry, where they were used primarily to weld car bodies together.
As technologies matured, robots began seeing use in other areas such as logistics, and in the medical and food industries. 2006 was the first year more robots were used outside the automotive industry than inside of it.
The main driver behind the rise of industrial robots is said to be a desire to reduce or eliminate the "Three D's"-dull, dangerous and dirty jobs. But other important drivers include the need for consistency of quality and consistency of flow in manufacturing.
Today, robots are used not just in huge manufacturing and logistics facilities, but in small and medium-sized businesses too, thanks to the advent of smaller, more affordable and easy-to-use collaborative robots.
The benefits of robotic automation include the following:
1. Robots improve the consistency of product quality and production line flow, meeting demand for high-quality products at a lower cost.
2. They save workers from having to perform repetitive, tedious, and dangerous tasks at work.
3. Today's connected or "Industry 4.0" robots are able to consistently generate data on parts flow and process quality-data that can be used by AI or old-school data analysis to optimize both a factory and manufacturing processes.
4. Thanks to greater inherent flexibility than special machines or other hard automation, robots enable greater product...