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In Dongguan City, located in the central Guangdong province of China, a technology company has set up a factory run almost exclusively by robots, and the results are fascinating.
The Changying Precision Technology Company factory in Dongguan has automated production lines that use robotic arms to produce parts for cell phones. The factory also has automated machining equipment, autonomous transport trucks, and other automated equipment in the warehouse.
There are still people working at the factory, though. Three workers check and monitor each production line and there are other employees who monitor a computer control system. Previously, there were 650 employees at the factory. With the new robots, there's now only 60. Luo Weiqiang, general manager of the company, told the People's Daily that the number of employees could drop to 20 in the future.
The robots have produced almost three times as many pieces as were produced before. According to the People's Daily, production per person has increased from 8,000 pieces to 21,000 pieces. That's a 162.5% increase.
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The growth of robotics in the area's factories comes amidst a particularly harsh climate around factory worker conditions, highlighted by strikes in the area. One can only wonder whether automation will add fuel to the fire or quell some of the unrest.
Is eliminating the work force the best way to solve labor unrest?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 03 2015, @09:19AM
Our plant used plastic injection machinery to produce parts for equipment. Our worst problem over the years, involved plastic chassis with metal inserts. An operator at the machine placed the metal inserts onto pins inside the mold each time the machine cycled. We had a fair amount of rejects, because the insert wasn't loaded. Worse, was when some operator loaded the insert backwards. In almost all cases, a backward-loaded insert caused damage to the mold. A production run that called for 120,000 parts by some certain date and time could be set back hours, or days, while the mold was out of the machine being repaired.
Enter the robots. Sometimes, an insert fails to load, but they never get loaded backward. There is an immediate, tremendous savings, because the molds are not being damaged by an inattentive operator.
Better yet, from the company's point of view, cycle times have been shortened. Previously, cycle time was a compromise between what the machine was capable of, and what the operator was capable of. Some parts are kicked out of the machine, and require no further actions on the part of the operator. Other parts require the operator to affix screws, pulleys, heat shields, or some other sub-assembly procedure. So, the operator might require 90 seconds to perform his other functions, before loading the mold with new inserts. The robot? It's always ready to load new inserts before the mold closes, so that 90 second cycle might be shortened to 80, or even 70 seconds. Or, a 240 second cycle might be shortened to 200 seconds. The increase in productivity, plus the savings on mold repairs are tremendous.
That doesn't make me like the damned robots though. They can be a total pain in the ass as well. In one instance, the engineers failed to build strong enough supports for a trimmer station, and it gets out of adjustment pretty often. Another robot seems to be excessively sensitive to any fluctuation in power, and loses it's bearings, requiring a reset. Each robot has it's quirks, which means that some nights, I can run my ass off fixing problems.
Except for the backward loaded inserts, I'd rather deal with humans. Humans are pretty easy to fix, most of the time. Just lay a wrench upside their heads to adjust their attitudes. Robots are much more complex than that.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday August 03 2015, @10:46AM
Thanks, Runaway, quite interesting.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @07:10PM
I lived through a slow transition at a factory from old-school humans to full automation. Something I always found interesting was that the machines were treated better. The humans were just given a box of each part and shown how to do the job a couple times. The machines had humans or other machines to sort, orient, and stack parts for optimal efficiency. A human had to grab something from several boxes, orient, affix, then run the operation. All the machines had to do was grab blindly with the fixture and run the operation.
When the pre-setup is not quite perfect for the machines they will happily slam wrong parts together, make runs of assemblies missing internal components, and do all sorts of things that will destroy themselves. That was my job. Stopping them from doing that, clearing damaged parts, ensuring sensor calibration (why do they get so off so fast?), tweaking and all around babysitting.
To me, it always looked like if you don't give the humans (yeah I know how derogatory I have been, that is what factories are like) as much TLC as the machines get, it is not fair or business savvy to compare their output. There were no human technicians. There were no auto-loaders for the humans. When a human messed a few parts up on an easy operation they were canned on the spot. When a machine makes 1,000 bad parts without the QA alarm going off we spend time and money on figuring out why. We certainly don't scrap the machine for another.
I always have wondered if there were actual real human engineers, not just managers and systems engineers. What would it be like for someone to be well-versed in psychology and manufacturing in a role of "human technician" and compare that environment to the coddling we give machines. What would it look like?
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Monday August 03 2015, @08:03PM
This post made me pause and think.
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:57AM
This is something I've been thinking about more over the past couple of years, that perhaps if we treated people more like machines, they'd be happier and more productive. I know, that sounds awful, but notice that I didn't say "exactly" like machines. I don't mean "do the same things to them that you would with an actual machine", but rather this approach: Here's an unknown machine that varies in it's productivity depending on how it is treated (just like every other machine). What do we have to do to make it more productive, and that includes making it last longer (and even want to stay)? It should be obvious that health and happiness would then become priorities (even though I know that yes, some people don't get that). Additionally, that each of these "machines" works differently, and needs to be treated differently (after all, they all come with different software and hardware). Over time and study of individual units, I'm sure that certain commonalities and even "types" may start to be noticed, but until these can be reliably and scientifically predicted, each unit should be treated individually.
And yes, the other main difference is that we can't just throw these machines out if they displease us. Human rights and all that. ;)
(Score: 1) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:41AM
I am a control systems engineer.
I have only worked on process engineering not batched jobs such as you describe. But from my experience humans are terrible at reliability and great at reacting to unexpected situations.
Humans get bored; I have yet to come across a level transmitter that gives the wrong indication because it was inattentive due to boredom. Humans are slow to react; and machines cannot make intuitive judgement calls based on the general state of the plant. Humans have a definate "operational capacity" aka they can only deal with a set amount of information in a given time; I have plants with 10's of thousands of sensors happily humming along; however if there is no code to handle a specific set of conditions who knows what will happen.
Each is significantly better at doing what it is good at (and a good operator is worth their weight in gold). Increasing automation is the only way to compete with low wage economies.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.