Personal Robotics: Like Personal Computing, But With Arms

They promised me trips to Mars, flying cars and a personal robot.  Mars is still 20 years away, all my cars are still solidly on the ground (in retrospect, flying cars was probably not such a great idea anyhow), and until last week all I knew about personal robots was the Roomba.  Now, however, let me introduce you to Baxter via this article in the Fiscal Times, a personal industrial robot from Rethink Robotics in Boston, Massachusetts (full disclosure – I have no affiliation or relationship with anyone at Rethink Robotics).

I am not nearly as doom and gloom about the jobless aspect of robots as the article portends.  In fact, it’s developments like Baxter and other related technical innovations that make myself and SAS quite bullish on the prospects for manufacturing around the world, in the developed economies as well as the less developed.

To quickly summarize the article (well worth the read),”Baxter, and those like him will completely change manufacturing as we know it.”  Baxter is cheap ($27,000 including the three year warranty), mobile, can work in close proximity with humans, and is trainable in fifteen minutes – no engineer level programing required.

Robots are just another piece of machinery, another piece of capital equipment, tools typically employed not to replace humans, but to make them more efficient and effective, or allow them to do things they normally couldn’t do.  Humans as machine operators - tool users so-to-speak.  We are all familiar with the heavy equipment operator running his bulldozer, power shovel or crane, and don’t give a second thought to the hundreds of men that the equipment replaced, because by and large, that piece of heavy equipment didn’t really replace anyone – most modern construction projects could not even be attempted without such equipment available.

As counterpoint to my position from an earlier post, “Triangles, Tools and Transformations”, where I originally touted the transformational aspect of analytics, I want to stress instead for this immediate purpose the tool or “force multiplier” aspect of robotic development, although truth be told, Baxter, with his trainability, combines the best of both worlds.  Robots allow us to become equipment operators rather than simply manual labor for its own sake.  Our human labor isn’t being replaced, it’s being multiplied and augmented.

That of course is the primary message of Rethink Robotics – that Baxter doesn’t really replace anyone - Baxter augments the human labor already there, increasing worker productivity by tackling tasks that have never been economically automated before and  improving the ability to compete with manufacturers who rely on low-cost, offshored labor.  Rethinking robotics implies rethinking offshoring, keeping simple manufacturing processes in-house, with lower logistics costs, shorter supply chains, close to engineering and design, and most importantly, close to the customer.

Rethink Robotics in fact agrees with my analogy to the personal computer and how it revolutionized the office worker’s job.  Up until now manufacturing equipment and the associated robotics have been big, even huge in scale – think of automobile assembly line welding robots.  Early in my career I worked for a laser manufacturer where one of our products was a CO2 industrial laser, a massive, permanently mounted device that emitted an invisible beam of infrared radiation that would take your leg off like a hot knife through butter.  Most definitely NOT a personal laser.

The PC started out by automating our mundane accounting / spreadsheet / word processing tasks, giving us control over compute power that was previously reserved for only the biggest of computational tasks in the data center.  But it soon evolved into areas where no mainframe would ever tread, such as video games and music, going miniature and mobile on laptops and cell phones.

The PR (personal robot) has the same potential as the PC, creatively enabling production capabilities andbusiness models that would be the envy of Spacely Sprockets.  The first several generations of Baxter and his kin are likely to automate and augment known repetitive manual tasks, but it won’t be long before resourceful individuals start to hack their Baxter and put it to uses that begin to bring the world of the Jetson’s closer to reality.

By Leo Sadovy, EPM Contributor, from: http://blogs.sas.com/content/valuealley/2013/04/09/personal-robotics-like-personal-computing-but-with-arms/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ValueAlley+%28Value+Alley%29

Leo Sadovy handles marketing for Performance Management at SAS, which includes the areas of budgeting, planning and forecasting, activity-based management, strategy management, and workforce analytics, and advocates for SAS’ best-in-class analytics capability into the office of finance across all industry sectors. Before joining SAS, he spent seven years as Vice-President of Finance for Business Operations for a North American division of Fujitsu, managing a team focused on commercial operations, customer and alliance partnerships, strategic planning, process management, and continuous improvement. During his 13-year tenure at Fujitsu, Leo developed and implemented the ROI model and processes used in all internal investment decisions—and also held senior management positions in finance and marketing.Prior to Fujitsu, Sadovy was with Digital Equipment Corporation for eight years in sales and financial management. He started his management career in laser optics fabrication for Spectra-Physics and later moved into a finance position at the General Dynamics F-16 fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas.He has an MBA in Finance and a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing. He and his wife Ellen live in North Carolina with their three college-age children, and among his unique life experiences he can count a run for U.S. Congress and two singing performances at Carnegie Hall.