Slashdot: How Everyday Things Are Made

[Matt Reiland]

Originally posted by SuperDanman
I was told that at car factories like Honda and such, everything is completely automated - automated to the point where there are a total of 3, 5 people on duty there just to make sure the place doesn't burn down or anything like that (yeah, the number's probably exaggerated, but if you think back to the time of Henry Ford where assembly plants employed thousands, well, thats one of the consequences of industrialization).

Well, there is a HUGE amount of automation in the plants but the people are definitely not gone,
and I can't see them leaving any time soon. Automation doesn't make sense in every aspect of the
assembly of products. For instance, the welding of a vehicle in the old days required lines of people
to lug around huge spot weld guns with a cable over their shoulder carrying 1000's of Amps of current
for resistance spot weld, hitting the right number of welds in the exact location all day long is next
to impossible. Now for that, a robot is perfect, it can do it all day, no breaks, 3 shifts and the output
is exactly the same every time. Laying beads of sealer and painting the vehicle is exactly the same.
Lifting heavy loads are also not a problem for most robots, Now head over to General
Assembly where the interior gets put in and things are different. The supplier gives you a box of say wiring
harnesses in a big box. Getting a robot to pull a part out of a box that isn't perfectly organized
starts the problem, then getting it to install something like that ups the ante even more. Automation
is only as smart as the programmer and there are limitations to what is cost effective and what isn't. Our
current robots are good at repeating the same task over and over, they are not good at figuring out on their
own how to pick up a part then orient it correctly then put it in, there are systems with vision that can
do just that, but the price goes up VERY quickly. There will always be a group that has to maintain the
equipment also, unlike the Terminator it doesn't last forever.

Most plants still employ 1000's of people to make vehicles at rates up to about 80/hr.