Name: How Robots Will Lead To More Jobs
Uploaded: 2017-03-15
Duration: 4 min 34 s
Description: Universal Robots' Douglas Peterson sees a future of 'man with machine.'

[ MUSIC ] I'm here we Douglas Peterson the GM of the America's for universal robots and we're gonna talk about robots in the future of work. How are you Douglas? Great. Great to be here Andrew .>> Let's talk a little bit about what your company does, who Who does it serve? What kind of industries? Who wants robots today? The classic, if you will, application would be machine tending. Mm. So we do a lot of machine tending. Mm. So we do a lot of machine tending. And machine shops where you have a metal cutting machine, or a plastic objection moulding machine. Mm- hm. You're loading and unloading that machine. Typically, a worker all day long, that's all they do is load and unload a machine. So the robot replaces that particular role. And then the worker can think of other ways to improve the process around that machine. Pick and place, packaging ?>> That's classic to me. Sure .>> And there's a lot of that. There's some dispensing where you might be placing a bead of glue around an object that needs to be glued together. Driving screws down on in light assembly type applications. A lot of that. And now we're getting into more and more kind of applications you might not think about. Fast food industry, flipping burgers. That's wild. We have an application where it actually cuts a sandal. It cuts the shape, it measures the shape of your foot and it cuts a flip flop out of- Custom. Custom flip flops. Wow. Assisting with surgery. We have a OEM that utilizes our robotic arm to hold a camera and lighting around the surgical operation. Which is quite a bit more sophisticated then simply picking something off of a conveyor belt, right? Exactly. There's been a lot of fears around whether or not robots will take over jobs, right? I mean, that's the man versus machine, the constant battle that we see in the movies, and certainly we see With the rise of technology. It's really not that simple, is it? Tell me a little bit about how you're looking at this. You say man versus machine, we say man with machine. Cuz in our view, it's the employee, man or woman, that's deploying the machine so they work right along side it. From a small and medium enterprise, from the ownership standpoint, don't have to Reconfigure the application or the process, you are not having to rearrange equipment as much as you will more traditional robots. You can put that robot right in place easily mount it, plug it into the wall, start programming it. And what's happening is the employees themselves, Are thinking of new ways to deploy the robot in the manufacturing environment. Tell me a little bit about how you look at the deployment of robots and then also the retraining of existing workers, right? Because that's the argument, that technology doesn't destroy jobs but it certainly kind of Yeah Re- does them, [ LAUGH ] Well, I think you know awareness and training is key to really exploding this market of collaborate robot. We have a partner in Ohio, Ramtec, and they're an educational organization that trains on robotics and machine tools and all kinds of different manufacturing technology. And they estimated in Ohio, alone, there is a gap of 60000 unfilled manufacturing jobs. And so their mission is to train, more employees out of highschool. Right. Retrain existing workers on the work force, to be able to implement automation and implement robotics. They also estimate that by the end of the year 2020, there might be upwards of 2 million on film manufacturing jobs. So by getting people trained, getting robots deployed, those robots can then be used to cover and close the shortage. The manufacturing labor shortages of those 2 million. And just continue to kinda close that gap and make companies more competitive. Let's talk about return on investment. Is that a huge part of the buying decision for one of these? Yeah, and particularly for a small or medium enterprise where they may not have the resources. They may not have the capital investment budgets like a large organization would have. Up- front investment of a collaborative robot is about a third of what a traditional robot might be. So you might be in the 30, $ 40, 000 range at the lowest end, up to a $ 60, 000 implementation for a collaborative robot. That would probably be triple for more of a traditional style robot. And because you can get so much more productivity by utilizing the robot, also, you typically, we see on average about 195 days payback. But we've seen some payback Under 30 days ->> Jeez. We just got a recent application, was 28 day payback period. Wow. For an application, it was a machine tending application and a medical device type of industry. So very, very attractive return on investment for the small- medium and even larger enterprises. Douglas, thank you so much for being with us. Thanks for having me, Andrew, it was a pleasure. For more on the future of work, go to fourtune. com. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Universal Robots' Douglas Peterson sees a future of 'man with machine.'