Many people hear about artificial intelligence and think “robots!” But the great gains in Large Language Models that power ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are having trivial impact on industrial robots, at least so far. The future looks much better, according to experts in the industry, but not right away. The LLMs process words and images in ways that enable them to summarize information, ask questions and generate images. The capabilities of the LLMs have blossomed in the past few years, but that does not immediately translate into a factory setting. “There’s a whole lot of robots out in the world that don’t have any AI component in them whatsoever and are doing meaningful work,” Erik Nieves, CEO of Plus One Robotics told me on a video chat. He said that whatever was “… sitting in your garage was built by robots that don’t know what AI is.” Welding has been performed by robots in automobile manufacturing since 1967. Key to success there is a controlled environment and large quantity of repetitive operations. A fender weld for a given model car is the same over and over. Car model production runs typically amount to over 100,000 units per year and can be much larger. A customized robotic welder makes sense. But a company making 1000 units of some product may not find a robot cost effective. A robot would make even less sense for field repairs with variable temperature and humidity. That’s true even though robots are cheaper than ever before, according to Nieves. Advances in machine learning (the mathematical operations behind AI) enable better robotics when there is more data and information. That’s why Nieves’ company specializes in package sorting equipment. There were 161 billion packages shipped in 2022, according to Pitney Bowes. That’s enough data for AI to learn the shape of packages and how to figure out where they are going.
Full report : : Eventually AI Will Transform Manufacturing Robotics and automation.
