Airbus

In many industrial applications, the battle between man and machine is long ago over. Today, robots and heavy automation assets are performing tasks quicker, cheaper, safer, and to a better standard than their human counterparts in manufacturing plants around the world. Nevertheless, there remain those industrial sectors during which the skilled operator has (thus far) resisted the increase of the machines; low volume, premium quality, and highly customizable products still are assembled using largely manual processes in areas like aerospace and luxury automotive manufacturing, but could that be close to change? 

The drivers for not automating in these sectors are clear, whilst automation is technically viable for several manufacturing processes, the high setup costs balanced against a comparatively short (or unknown) production run encourage a low-risk ROI based approach to investment. Additionally, in cases of high product variability, it's going to be true that found out times and tooling changeovers render the automated option cumbersome and slow as compared to a talented and highly flexible operator. 

However, the raft of new technologies which have arrived with the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) mean that the choice of manual vs automation is no longer a binary one. Through technology it is now possible to bring to bear through the hands of an operator many of the characteristics to which we have always looked to automation, but at a fraction of the cost.

“For any revolution, whether cultural, political or technological, to truly take hold there must reach a point when the new way of doing things becomes a no-brainer, when it is so clearly the right thing to do that any challenge or scepticism falls away, we are at that point.”

Data-rich MES systems linked to interactive instruction manual are now replacing traditional paper-based production processes (and the anomaly that came with them), work stations wirelessly connected to all or any of the tooling utilized in a process are eliminating human selection error, sensors within that tooling are attesting to its own performance (and that of the operator), and therefore the data captured from all of these elements is transmitted to the cloud for storage and analysis. 

What we are left with is a digitally enhanced human being at the heart of the process, an operator interacting with technology to perform their role in a quicker, higher-quality and more repeatable way—the hallmarks of a good robot!

In the aerospace industry, products often have a life cycle spanning several decades—over 50 years within the case of the Boeing 747! In most cases, the economic system and footprint are established at the outset of the program and never fundamentally revisited throughout the assembly run. Of course, incremental improvements are a given, but the mixing of serious heavy automation into a producing process whilst maintaining existing production is hugely prohibitive, expensive, and risky. 

The Industry 4.0 technologies touched on (only briefly) above offer a replacement and substantial opportunity to deliver significant process improvements to legacy manufacturing processes like those within the aerospace industry (and others with similar systemic challenges.

In my opinion, we are now arriving at the tipping point for I4.0 in manufacturing, the technology is becoming ever cheaper and the potential savings to our processes ever more obvious. For any revolution, whether cultural, political or technological, to truly take hold there must reach a point when the new way of doing things becomes a no-brainer, when it is so clearly the right thing to do that any challenge or scepticism falls away, we are at that point. 

Heavy robotic process automation will continue to advance and grow in the areas where it makes sense to invest and deploy those systems.

However, for those areas where it does not, we now have a viable alternative to harness many of the same advantages— Industry 4.0 technology!

Welcome to the age of the digitally enhanced human work force.