Forecasting future adoption
Looking ahead, the expectations of robotics suppliers are bullish, with many believing that with the elections over and increased availability of COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon, much demand will return in industries where market skittishness has slowed robotic adoption. Meanwhile, those industries already seeing an uptick are expected to plough ahead at an even faster pace.
As a potential caveat to suppliers’ high expectations, our survey results were a bit more modest, with slightly less than a quarter of respondents reporting that they plan to add robots in the next year. Of those respondents, 56.5% plan to purchase cobots and 43.5% plan to purchase typical industrial robots.
However, some suppliers suggest that the lower expectations apparent in the survey results might be misleading. For instance, Wise feels that, with installations of traditional fixed robotics systems sometimes taking as long as 9-15 months, many respondents who indicated they do not plan to add more robots in the next year may already have projects underway. In addition, Joppru notes that though only 23% of respondents plan to add robots, some may add a substantial amount, meaning that overall growth for the industry could be significantly higher.
In terms of the factors driving specific robot purchases, 52.8% said ease of use and 52.6% said end-of-arm-tooling options, while only 38.5% were interested in specific collaborative capabilities. This result seems to imply that flexibility, rather than collaborative safety features themselves, may be driving end-users’ growing preference for cobots.
This is most certainly reflected in the HMLV space where manufacturers are dealing with a challenging combination of high labor costs and labor shortages on the one hand, and shorter product lifecycles mandating rapid changeover and an increased degree of production variability on the other. Doug Burnside, vice president of North American sales and marketing at Yaskawa-Motoman, notes the paradox of dealing with rapid changeover using a manual workforce is actually easier, as human beings are, by their nature, adaptable. It’s only when automation is brought in that the process becomes more challenging. However, increasing flexibility enabled by the integration of vision, artificial intelligence, and more diverse and modular tooling options are helping to surmount these challenges.
Elsewhere too, there are some areas where robots may prove themselves useful that haven’t yet begun adoption. According to Joppru, ABB has had preliminary discussions with the oil and gas industry about integrating new types of robots into their field operations, though the realization of these projects may be years off.
“In oil and gas, there’s still a lot of manual processes that happen where three guys grab a pipe, and then they put a chain around it, grab a new pipe, and attach it so that they can drill another 20 feet,” Joppru says. “Could we automate that with some robotic arms that would eliminate a dull, dirty, and dangerous job? That’s one example, and we’ve had discussions with customers about this being a new area of penetration for robots that we just haven’t been able to go after yet.”
With that in mind, even should job shops, contract manufacturers, and SMEs become as robot-laden as the biggest automotive manufacturers, there will still be plenty of room for expansion in the future.