Shoe-making robots at the Nike factory
News on September 5th, according to foreign media reports, the Nike factory has newly adopted a shoe-making robot that can reach 20 times the speed of manual labor.
The most labor-intensive part of assembling a pair of Nike shoes is assembling the "tongue," the very flexible part of the instep. The tongues of many sneakers appear to be a single piece of material with no visible seams, but they can actually be made from 40 pieces of material stacked on top of each other, heated and fused. Although robots can handle most of the shoemaking process, the process is so complex that humans are still in charge.
But Grabit, a startup that Nike invested in four years ago, has developed a shoe-making robot that uses electro-absorption to help the machine manipulate objects in novel ways. Despite its name "Grab it," the company's robotic innovation isn't based on imitating human grasping motions. They applied electrode plates, which, when properly charged, can generate an electric field that can attach to almost any surface. Grabit CEO Miller said the structure allows Grabit to do things robotic companies can't.
It takes a worker 10 to 20 minutes to line up all the material for a shoe tongue, while a Grabit robot takes only 50 to 75 seconds. If an 8-hour shift is calculated, a robot operated by an employee can make 300 to 600 pairs of shoes in a single shift. Over the past month, Grabit has begun supplying several of the machines, which can be assembled 20 times faster than humans, to factories that make Nike shoes.
By the end of 2017, more than ten units will be deployed to China and Mexico. According to foreign media, this may become a breakthrough attempt by Nike to change the economic structure of the shoe industry, and then bring the manufacturing industry closer to the huge consumer markets in the United States and Europe. According to data released by Nike, the company currently has 591 factories around the world and more than 1 million workers make Nike shoes.
According to foreign media reports, Tesla has accepted a large number of production robots delivered by the German company Kuka. They played a huge role in the mass production of the Model 3. According to Tesla's official statement, the mass production of the Model 3 will begin in July, and if everything goes according to plan, the company can ship as early as the end of this year.
The German KUKA company is a company specializing in the production of industrial-grade robots. The Model 3 assembly plant has set aside a very large area, and many KUKA robots are waiting to be installed there.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has always been an advocate of using advanced robots in the assembly line, and he even called Tesla's robot production line the largest and most advanced in the world. Last year, Musk announced on the social media site that 542 robots had been deployed on Tesla's production lines.
Intelligent robot warehouse is one of the effective means to improve fast efficiency in the future. The largest robot warehouse in China built by Cainiao Network has been put into use in Huiyang, Guangdong. Following the official reveal, we were able to understand the highest level of robotic warehouses in China.
According to Cainiao, there are hundreds of robots in the warehouse, which both cooperate and operate independently. After the warehouse is opened, Tmall's delivery will be accelerated again, and it is expected that the order will arrive in the afternoon when it is placed in the morning.
In the intelligent robot warehouse, hundreds of AGV handling robots have a shape similar to a large "sweeping robot". They both work together to perform the same order picking task, or they can perform different picking tasks independently. Despite the large number, the site is well-organized, with robots recognizing each other and giving way to each other based on task priority.
At present, there are only a dozen or 20 handling robots in many smart warehouses in China. "The difficulty of combining dozens of robots and hundreds of robots is very different."
Hu Haoyuan, a senior algorithm expert at Cainiao Network, said that more robots means more difficulty in assigning tasks. It is necessary to reasonably assign each task to the corresponding robot, so as to optimize the overall task completion efficiency. Possible collisions, preventing robot congestion and deadlocks in some areas.
It is understood that each robot can lift up to 500 catties, and can rotate flexibly at the same time, deploying all four sides of the shelf to the front of the picker, which is convenient for the picker to work.
So how exactly does the robot improve the efficiency of operations in the warehouse?
Take a consumer placing an order on Maochao as an example. After placing the order, the robot in the Huiyang Smart Warehouse of Cainiao Network will receive instructions.
The robot will automatically go to the corresponding shelf and pull the shelf in front of the picker, who will place the items purchased by the citizens in the shopping box, and then package and deliver. At present, robots work with pickers, and one picker can pick three times more items in one hour than traditional pickers.
In traditional warehouses, after consumers place orders, pickers need to run to the shelves to pick out the goods. Since a citizen's order usually consists of several or dozens of items, the picker needs to run multiple times in the warehouse, usually picking more than 100 items in an hour.
It is reported that the use of intelligent robot warehouses will greatly improve the efficiency of express sorting, and this year's Double Eleven consumers will also further shorten the delivery time after shopping online at Tmall supermarkets.
According to the International Federation of Robotics, around 1.3 million industrial robots will be introduced into factories around the world by 2018, with the highest percentage in European factories.
From retail to manufacturing, from domestic service to national defense and military, relevant practitioners are worried that intelligent robots will one day make them redundant and become useless to society. decades.
Not just robots, but artificial intelligence, which has recently become hotter, has become another concern at this time, as they can implement complex algorithms. Technology has now become not only better than humans at physical tasks, but also able to use Google's search engine or IBM's Watson system to solve problems with brains in some respects better than humans.
So some people even suggested that some preparations should be made in advance, such as providing re-employment training or job transfer for some eliminated workers. In particular, some social work types and groups are financially vulnerable and will be the most affected by this shock.
What should really be considered is whether to wait to be completely eliminated, or to gain a new life because of this, this is the most important.
So, here comes the question, choose a few topics you are interested in and start a chat~
