As an engineering student at McMaster University in the late 1970s, Trevor Jones was at the right place at the right time to launch a fast-rising career in robotics. The university in Hamilton, Ontario, was a hotbed of robotic research at the time, and a couple of years after leaving school Jones hooked up with academic associates to found CRS Robotics, where they designed and brought to market one of the first tabletop robots with software features that rivaled the big industrial robots of the time.
CRS was acquired in 2002 by Thermo Electron Corp. (Burlington, Ontario), where Jones is now director of OEM business development.
In December, Jones was named president of the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), an industry trade group. It's fortuitous timing for Jones and the industry, which, according to the RIA, is on pace to set a record for units shipped in 2005. Recently, Managing Automation caught up with Jones to discuss trends in the robotics industry.
Q: What accounts for the growth spurt in the robotics market of late?
A: There are two things. Certainly, for this year, the statistics would seem to indicate that the automotive sector is the primary driver of 2005 unit sales... In terms of unit sales per year we will eclipse the previous record, which was 1999. Part of the huge growth is due to industry resurgence. After 1999 our unit sales dropped off quite a bit.
Q: Why automotive?
A: It's not clear exactly whether that's sustainable growth in the automotive sector. If you just read general news you know that automotive manufacturing in general is under assault. But, despite that, it does indicate that North American automotive manufacturers are trying to reap the rewards of productivity gains through automation, so they're continuing to invest in their products and their manufacturing facilities. And that's good news.
Q: Does the recent growth trend represent a shift in the market, or a normal cycle?
A: We see a slow and steady penetration into non-automotive markets. In my view it's not as fast as it should be. And one of the mandates of our association moving forward is to try to understand the bottleneck to robotic automation, the penetration of those technologies into more general industry applications. There's good evidence to suggest that low-payload applications [in non-heavy industries] are starting to grow, and that would indicate that more general industries are getting involved.
Q: Which emerging markets look promising?
A: One of the most interesting emerging markets that should have very general appeal is medical applications. All of the traditional strengths of robotic automation - repeatability, reliability - these things can play very strong roles in the medical field. The emergence of more appropriate standards will help to facilitate the incorporation of automation technologies into that field. You tend to think of the medical field as a service field. And, over the longer term, the primary untapped potential for robotics is in the service-related industries like medical.
Q: What standards need to emerge in order to enable the growth of robotics in some of these emerging markets?
A: Since robotics' birthright was in heavy manufacturing, the majority of standards development has been around robots as large, heavy-payload, industrial pieces of machinery... So, for example, you've seen advancements in things like safety code development that pigeonholes robots into that sector, but it's really not the case. Robotic automation now spans applications that have payloads under a kilogram to robots that can lug around 500 kilograms. But if you look at the state of standards development, it tends to paint the robotics industry with one brush, and it's just not appropriate. Work has to be done to recognize that robotic technologies have a very broad span and, in order to make them safely and economically useable in a number of applications, you need a more precise approach.
Q: What, besides standards, has retarded the growth of robotics outside of heavy industries such as automotive?
A: The old excuse used to be education. But that's become less of an excuse because robotics has been around for over 20 years, and practically every major manufacturing training institution has manufacturing programs that include robotic technologies. So the awareness of robotic technologies is growing.
It used to be that robotics were too expensive. But if you look at the 10-year trends, the compound annual price increase has been -5%.
[What's needed now is better integration.] Integrators are a necessary part of the value chain of robots. You just can't sell a robot product and plunk it down at an end user and say, 'There you go, have fun.' When you add up the cost of tooling, the cost of providing adequate safety fixturing, there's still a need for reductions in those kinds of costs to make robotic technology more affordable to a larger range of users, especially small shops. There's still a lot of GDP in the North American economy generated by small shops... And, when you look at the needs of those smaller companies... they are different than the big guys who can invest in huge training programs and standardization programs.
But, for the corner-shop guy who is manufacturing a product, what is in place to help him integrate brand new technology? He can now hire people out of school. Prices are dropping so at least his pocketbook isn't being dented quite so much. But, in the end, he is stuck with having to find an integrator to take these robotic technologies and make them work. The cost of that deliverable has to be seen as more affordable... Our association wants to try to find ways of making robotic technology more accessible to this range of integrators. We also need to facilitate the networking of all of these integrators so they can share ideas and find ways of doing business together.
Q: What key technology trends do you see coming to robotics?
A: The electromechanical performance of robots is becoming very commoditized. That's evidenced by dropping prices. I really do feel that the major tech trends are in robots becoming more aware of their processes. We see signs of that happening now, primarily in the vision space... But vision is just one type of sensing technology. There are other sensing technologies like force control and tactile sensing that could allow robots to have more intelligence to adapt to changing process conditions. That's a major trend.
Also, tying robots more into the information infrastructure of companies is an important trend. Large companies like GM and GE have these great statistical programs monitoring their processes. But the requirements for quality span the entire economic space. For the smaller shops, what is in place to allow them to analyze their process, understand how it is performing, and make improvements before a drop of quality kills the only product line they have?... This is an important technology advancement that has to become more mainstream than what it is now.
Q: What will be the single most important factor necessary to allow the industry to sustain the kind of growth it has seen recently?
A: There has to be an economic component, there has to be a payback... What's holding us back is finding ways to get this technology more and more into low-end shops... rather than just large industrial parks. The problem may be just one of availability of capital. There's a lot of money floating around in the world economy right now, but not a lot of aggressive investment. So we need to get to a point where people are willing to invest in startups and smaller companies.
Q: Are you advocating subsidies?
A: I'm Canadian, but I'm not socialist. Subsidies, I think, are futile and not sustainable. We aren't looking for that. What's important for RIA is to be a facilitator. We bring people together, and we bring ideas together. When you do that, you start to influence the collective braveness of the community. When people know that something can be done because they've been made aware that other people are doing it, there becomes an acceptance. So we're advocating education and programs that try to attract smaller players into our association and provide incentives for people to collaborate with each other. We're launching a new market assessment program where association dollars are being placed into investigating new markets for robotic technology and allowing that information to be shared among the membership. We're hoping to attract the tens of thousands of companies that could use our technology and don't know where to start.