FUTURE OF WORK
COLLABORATIVEROBOTICS Advance Industrial Automation 4.0 to empower SME in Manufacturing and Services sectors
producing competitive products and services. These robots are suitable for low value-added tasks and enhancing low-volume production such as packing, placing, and storing. Additionally, their flexibility and adaptability make them suitable for small batches of production which characterise SME manufacturing activities. Typically, these robots are lightweight and move slowly with enhanced sensor technology allowing them to detect and avoid collision. They need a few hours of re-programming without specialised knowledge and relatively autonomous. Collaborative robots are appealing because of their versatility and their ease of re-purpose. These can be installed quickly and retrained for other jobs. Cobots seem to have found a sweet spot within smaller factory operations where humans are still involved tending to 3D printers, manufacturing medical devices, or completing more cognitive tasks like warehouse order picking. Socio Economic Impact Overall demand for robotics can be sustained by adoption of robots to increase productivity and reduce the cost of manufacturing. Automation offers most productivity gains when robots take over low-skilled jobs. The introduction of collaborative robots will not limit automation to the ‘dull, dirty, and dangerous’ work. Instead it can enter a variety of industries and sectors that require versatility and dexterity such as the plastics, food & beverage, medical devices, other high-tech industries and in the clinical field as well as care for the elderly.
A collaborative robot is a new frontier for industrial robotics. The new generation of collaborative robots will transform industrial automation, allowing collaboration between workers and machines. Smaller collaborative robots are disrupting the robotics industry. As smartphone revolution and development of autonomous vehicles have driven down costs of off-the-shelf hardware, smaller, more dexterous robots have come onto the factory floor. These lighter weights, lower cost robots can be outfitted with sensors that allow them to work collaboratively alongside humans in industrial settings, creating robots that can perform tasks like gripping small objects, seeing, and even learning to tackle edge cases. Vision systems allow robots to identify and safely navigate around objects. In recent years, vision hardware such as Lidar has become much cheaper, more effective, and subsequently more widespread. Vision and sensor equipped collaborative robots operate cage-free alongside humans and come in many different shapes and sizes and are designed with human workplaces in mind. Acollaborative robot or cobot is designed tobe safe, adaptable, user-friendly displaying human-like features interacting directly with humans. The collaboration enables machine efficiency and human creativity to be combined effectively
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Malaysian Technology Strategic Outlook 2019/2020 Intergration of High Technology
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