Actually On Topic - WSJ writes about lack of US producers of Robots

Link here, likely behind a paywall for may of you
Foreign Robots Invade American Factory Floors - WSJ

It points the obvious to us bits - no US producers of industrial robots as off the shelf items (MotionGuru you need to draw their attention!)

Most machine tools now come from abroad.

And while I thought some large and fairly sophisticated press brakes are made in the US, market seems dominated by the likes of Trumpf.

Why in a business journal? Well, more manufacturing jobs and output requires these machines, which have to come from somewhere...

A moment in the gaze of the mainstream press...

Another article I can't read.

Haas makes "robots" here in the US. Soup to nuts. And they make a lot of them.

Fair point, but to the media and most "civilians" the term Robot means an articulated arm that manipulates objects in 3-space. So dishwashers, delta pick and place, bar fed lathes, etc. don't count as robots. (Even though you and I know they all fundamentally are...)

Truth is, nontechnical folks think of robots as quasi autonomous drone/walker/swimmer things.
The USA has never built serious parts handlers.
We designed the gear boxes, solved the math, developed the drives.
But left the rest to the Germans, Japanese, and other complex tool builders to produce a product.
My name is Miguel, I worked with Pedro (a German), Leonard (a Mexican), and Steven...another German.
To integrate a system from Germany with a system with an American brand from China.
None of that was "American".

could also be that the American companies that have tried eventually get bought
by a Foreign company and get gutted, or have the good parts striped out.
Or are just very poorly managed by the bean counters.

And plain old no one wants to invest the kind of money needed to produce a competitive
domestic product

it doesn't help that the components are imported

If you google unimate robot there's some interesting articles about the rise and fall of unimation. Another US invention abandoned before its prime. Remnants eventually sold to Staubli of France who still manufactures robots.

Cinci Milacron built a large new plant near Greenville SC in the 80's to manufacture robots. We sold our house to a Milacron engineer who had been transferred to Gvl prior to the plant opening. Around 3 yrs later we dropped by to visit our old next door neighbor in Gvl and learned the guy had recently sold the house because they were closing the plant and had transferred him again.

Miguels244 said:

The USA has never built serious parts handlers.

Click to expand...

Kids these days

I can't expect you to remember the seventies but the US was full of robot-makers. Go to a show and there must have been ten of them. And the press was exactly the same as now, "Automation is replacing workers !"

Umm, if so, they are sure taking their own sweet time ...

Even before that, if you look at anything out of Detroit, there was a ton of automated parts handling. I went to the ITW Gear School in the mid-seventies, they had all this stuff for automatically producing and measuring parts on production lines, and a bunch of gear machines had auto-loaders. One of the first things you did when you got a machine cheap out of Detroit was strip off the auto-loading. Didn't make sense for a job shop. Automation has been here a long time.

metlmunchr said:

If you google unimate robot there's some interesting articles about the rise and fall of unimation. Another US invention abandoned before its prime. Remnants eventually sold to Staubli of France who still manufactures robots.

Cinci Milacron built a large new plant near Greenville SC in the 80's to manufacture robots. We sold our house to a Milacron engineer who had been transferred to Gvl prior to the plant opening. Around 3 yrs later we dropped by to visit our old next door neighbor in Gvl and learned the guy had recently sold the house because they were closing the plant and had transferred him again.

Click to expand...

Unimation, Westinghouse, GM-Fanuc, Cincinnati, a bunch more ... I had a plastic Cincinnati robot that the Cincy saleman gave me, the wrist moved, base rotated, arm moved, all that. Electric ones, hydraulic ones, all kinds. That was the same time that the "100 Years of Cincinnati" book came out. Neat book. Real history, not what you get with wikipedia.

Everybody had them at IMTS and Westec in that time period. Then real people with real factories found out that for most jobs, people were cheaper and a lot more versatile. And the US robot companies that invented the things all went tits-up.

The Wall Street Journal has been writing this same article for forty years now, at least. ROI on that story must be phenomenal.