Are We About To Meet Our Future Robot Coworker
We hear the phrase, Robots are going to steal your job, in fact it’s one concept that overrides any other ideas when it comes to Robots entering the work place. If we look at the most heavily automated countries in the world such as japan, South Korea and Germany, they also have some of the lowest employment rates.
This would lead to the concept that Robots create jobs instead of taking them and although this concept is not easily understood, it certainly seems to be the case. The world Economic forum predicts the Robots revolution will displace 85 million jobs but will also create 97 million new roles.
As an example, the president of ABB takes one of their Customers in the UK, a welding Company which was being limited until they introduced Robot automation for low level tasks. Not only was the Welding Company able to expand their business but highly skilled workers were able to concentrate on more interesting tasks and gain more training which they would not automatically have had the opportunity to do.
At the end of 2019, there was already 2.7 million industrial Robots in factories globally, this figure is up by 12 per cent from 2018. There are now many more sectors including logistics, healthcare and more recently food production.
The rise is largely due to a better understanding that Robotics can increase productivity and provide much needed training for staff including possibilities, Cobots are also playing an important role in the rise of Automation. Cobots or collaborative robots that can work safely alongside people have doubled their share of the market since 2017.
Cobots differ from Robots because they work brilliantly side by side with humans, this is due to passive and active safety systems. This allows Robots and people to safely work alongside each other and cooperate on the same task for maximum flexibility and efficiency.