May 17, 2023

I cover the future of manufacturing, especially additive. Got it! bought ROS - the open source Robot Operating System project - last year. Now its X incubation, Intrinsic , announced its first product, Flowstate. Its aim is to make robotic programming accessible to everybody. Yet, without a cultural shift, its efforts are likely to be in vain. Alphabet's Intrinsic introduced its first product, Flowstate, this week. Intrinsic.ai The challenge is that most people using these robots in industrial settings, don't seem to be programming themselves. Startups like Modbot learned that at their peril. Their collaborative robot was designed to be deployable by anyone. Yet, the company faced significant headwinds from companies insisting that automation experts lead deployment. Today, Modbot focuses on services to deploy these robots, instead of empowering operators. This reality of industrial operations is one of the reasons the ROS-Industrial project spun out of the main ROS initiative. Relying on experts to deploy robotic systems makes their use cases more rigid and the resulting production lines less flexible. That runs counter to the interests of industry, which are desperately trying to inject agility into manufacturing after the pandemic exposed significant supply chain challenges. Empowering operators to deploy robots is possible, given the right tools. No-code tools powering Robotic Process Automation (RPA), such as Microsoft’s Power Automate, are one example of this. Doing so for physical robots would aid agility, as systems are more easily adapted and redeployed. Yet, managers seem reticent to allow frontline workers to do so. The failure to empower operators is one of the reasons for the ongoing productivity slump in Europe and North America. “Average annual growth in labour productivity – measured as real GDP per hour worked – in those euro area countries that have sufficiently long time series has continuously declined from about 7% in the 1960s to just 1% since the early 2000s” reports the EU (see Chart 1). MORE FOR YOU