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Make America's Robots Great Again . . .

motion guru

Diamond
Joined
Dec 8, 2003
Location
Yacolt, WA
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/...mericas-robots-great-again.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

This would require a large government expenditure similar in nature (not in scope) to the effort required to put a man on the moon which developed technologies that had innumerable spin off applications for a broad array of industries.

I read Frank Tobe's robot report regularly and while I don't agree with everything he writes, he is more right than wrong on any given topic related to this industry. The skill and cost required to design / manufacture / program / support a new US based robotics company that could compete with existing Japanese, German, Sweden (now china?) . . . will be very high.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/...mericas-robots-great-again.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

This would require a large government expenditure similar in nature (not in scope) to the effort required to put a man on the moon which developed technologies that had innumerable spin off applications for a broad array of industries.

I read Frank Tobe's robot report regularly and while I don't agree with everything he writes, he is more right than wrong on any given topic related to this industry. The skill and cost required to design / manufacture / program / support a new US based robotics company that could compete with existing Japanese, German, Sweden (now china?) . . . will be very high.

Well, hoeslty I was hoping for a good read. After seeing it a NY times piece I had my doubts. It did not make it past the first paragraph before giving up. What happened to a nonpartisan news. It all is extreme left or extreme right propaganda. Tired of that bs.
 
I am not sure why giant government expenditure is necessary here. Industrial robots are of finite complexity. For perhaps ten million dollars your company or my company or a host of others could get into the game.

But they're also rapidly becoming commodities. Look at what happened with Adept. Essentially, right now, to get into the robot game you'd need to be designing a robot that cost less than a grand per axis to build. Epson are talking about a $7000 SCARA.

Integration, of course, is a whole different ballgame.
 
Are't robot's a mature industry like machine tools? Seems to me your about 30 years to late getting started to be a world leader in robot's.
 
Think of your Android phone with accelerometer, GPS, inclinometer, compass, camera all integrated with wireless data technology (cellular, bluetooth, wifi) with a touchscreen and 64GB SD memory card . . . every one of these features if deployed on a robot comes with a price tag in the thousands of dollars for the sensor and/or comms link plus software integration interface.

This is kind of like hanermo's thread on battery powered electric vehicles . . . in order for BEV's to be embraced on a large scale - they need to be cheaper (I think 50% cheaper than the pricing models of today). Same goes for Robots -

If robots came out of the box with force control, dual encoder feedback, well integrated vision, safety, collaborative features, simplified programming interface, native intra-controller networkability, ability for multi-robot coordination, etc. . . . they would be applied in an order of magnitude more applications.
 
If robots came out of the box with force control, dual encoder feedback, well integrated vision, safety, collaborative features, simplified programming interface, native intra-controller networkability, ability for multi-robot coordination, etc. . . . they would be applied in an order of magnitude more applications.

Actually, the ones I buy do come with force control, dual encoder feedback (I'm pretty sure), collaborative features, simplified programming, native intra-controller networkability, multi-robot coordination.... but there is a price.......
 
Think of your Android phone with accelerometer, GPS, inclinometer, compass, camera all integrated with wireless data technology (cellular, bluetooth, wifi) with a touchscreen and 64GB SD memory card . . . every one of these features if deployed on a robot comes with a price tag in the thousands of dollars for the sensor and/or comms link plus software integration interface.

This is kind of like hanermo's thread on battery powered electric vehicles . . . in order for BEV's to be embraced on a large scale - they need to be cheaper (I think 50% cheaper than the pricing models of today). Same goes for Robots -

If robots came out of the box with force control, dual encoder feedback, well integrated vision, safety, collaborative features, simplified programming interface, native intra-controller networkability, ability for multi-robot coordination, etc. . . . they would be applied in an order of magnitude more applications.

Surely. Robots coming out of the box facing a harsh world as new University grads do, being relegated to flipping burgers and landscaping yards 'coz there is no work for the 'overqualified.

Next thing yah know, unemployed robots would be living at home past age 40, watching porn all day, start stealing to support the drug habit picked up of despair.

Tossed out of 'home', they'd be living under bridges, sleeping rough, and trading sex for a contaminated battery charge.

There'd be batterylines instead of breadlines as the nation filled up with out of work robots. They'd match on Washington to demand Medicare coverage...

We've seen this movie already.

Mought be better we kept 'em stupid and told 'em lies..

Oh....

Wait.


That didn't work last time, either...

Bill
 
Integration costs are definitely holding things back. Robots have gotten relatively inexpensive, but the integration costs are still pretty high. To bring costs down, they need to build more robots, but decreasing the cost of the robot only helps a little if integration costs remain high, so it's hard to sell lots of robots. Catch-22.

Smartphones are a good example of how if you build enough of something the costs come down. When you're building a bunch of cell phones, you design a circuit board with all of the components on it. If you're building an industrial machine you (traditionally) build it out of DIN rail mount components, each of which has lots of overhead, and then wire everything together. This is a much more expensive proposition.
 
Robots, smobots. Where we should be putting effort (and I expect research is going full steam, but under the radar) is in bio-actuators, or artificial muscle. Get it to the point where you have fine control of piezo-based electrically contracting synthetic fibers, with the strength and range of motion of hydraulic systems, and you'll make all the science fiction stories on androids (no, not the phones) come true.

Electroactive polymers - Wikipedia

I'm waiting for the day I can order up my custom Scarlett Johansson lookalike android companion, I'll quit work and try to see if kicking off from too much sex is a real thing.
 
Are't robot's a mature industry like machine tools? Seems to me your about 30 years to late getting started to be a world leader in robot's.

I think that about nails it.

Why invest more in Robots? The money would be better invested in circumventing the negative effects of robots.

French primary candidate Benoît Hamon has proposed to levy a tax on robots, the proceeds of which would go towards social security.

To my mind that is forward thinking.

Robot labour will not just further the redistribution of wealth towards the rentier class, it will also seriously effect the tax base.

It will be hard to collect your pension when the robot that makes you redundant doesn't pay into the pension plan.
 
Surely. Robots coming out of the box facing a harsh world as new University grads do, being relegated to flipping burgers and landscaping yards 'coz there is no work for the 'overqualified.

Next thing yah know, unemployed robots would be living at home past age 40, watching porn all day, start stealing to support the drug habit picked up of despair.

Tossed out of 'home', they'd be living under bridges, sleeping rough, and trading sex for a contaminated battery charge.

There'd be batterylines instead of breadlines as the nation filled up with out of work robots. They'd match on Washington to demand Medicare coverage...

We've seen this movie already.

Mought be better we kept 'em stupid and told 'em lies..

Oh....

Wait.


That didn't work last time, either...

Bill

GM Robot Super Bowl Commercial - YouTube
 
He said they would pay for the wall, he didn't mention anything about who would pick up the tab for tooling expenses.

That is so very, very 'real' as to the sort of investment long having had to be made for the factories already there.

Modular pre-fab wall could become a major industrial export for Mexico.

Think of the global demand: Mexico's own Southern border, Israel, Ukraine, Baltic states, Kaliningrad, South China sea island-shaped-objects.. Hell - more than half of Europe could use it to keep out THEIR immigrants...

Sure hate to think Trump had this figured out first.

T'would make it harder to question his other moves..

:)

Bill
 








 
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