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Robotic arms, likely to replace humans at manufacturer-employers, featured at WESTEC 2017
The future of manufacturing — which looks a lot more robotic and a lot less human — is on display as WESTEC 2017 kicked off its three-day run at Los Angeles Convention Center on Tuesday.
The annual trade show highlights some of the latest technologies in manufacturing, leaving little doubt that automation is not the coming king, it’s the king that is here.
At the Lyndex Nikken booth, a robotic arm deftly retrieved a cylindrical metal part and moved it from one machine to another. Its movements were quick and precise.Industrial Robotic Arm
“What you’re looking at is our presentation area where the robot will pick up the piece and load it into the main spindle of the turning center,” said Randy Peacock, a senior engineering specialist with the Mundelein, Illinois-based tech firm. “In the second operation, it will load it into one of our pallet chucks. And then the robot will take the part and load it into our rotary cable site.”In layman’s terms that equates to efficiency, the kind of efficiency that has increasingly displaced blue-collar workers throughout the U.S. A report released earlier this year from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. shows that California lost 181,400 manufacturing jobs from 2007 to 2016.
And there’s another ripple effect from all of this evolving technology.“Unfortunately, it’s getting harder to find people with the right skills in manufacturing,” Peacock said. “But more and more these days, businesses are going to automation. You can have four machines and just have one person tend all four machines.”The Manufacturing Institute and DeLoitte reported last year that the skills gap is widening in manufacturing. Some 3.4 million manufacturing jobs likely will be needed during the next decade, the report said, but 60 percent of those positions probably will remain unfilled because of the talent shortage.
Across the way at WESTEC, Irvine-based Universal Robots displayed its own robotic arm with a hand-held controller that allowed visitors to take a shot at operating the device.
“The objective is to get people familiar with programming robots and to understand that it’s no longer as difficult as it used to be,” said Dylan Shanahan, a technical support engineer with the company. “It’s actually become a lot simpler to get it into the hands of operators.”
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