How to thrive in the age of robots
Via Robotics Industry Association, how collaborative robots are part of the workplace. When compliance in areas like safety becomes a focus, that means the technology has become more established. How can people thrive?
Key point: “As a growing number of collaborative robots inhabit the factory floor, safety continues to be a major concern. Collaborative robotics and safety go hand in hand. You can’t have human-robot collaboration without mitigating the risks for injury.”
Points:
- Specs out: “…technical specifications in the collaborative robotics realm was released in February. ISO/TS 15066:2016 Robots and Robotic Devices – Collaborative Robots provides data-driven guidelines for designers, integrators, and users of human-robot collaborative systems on how to evaluate and mitigate risks.”
- The real story: “…it’s a common misconception that if the robot is ‘inherently safe’ then the operation is safe. Not true.”
Impact on the workforce: “The question is how do you achieve that higher output without adding people? Sometimes it’s very hard to add people because of the space constraints. By adding robots, we were able to achieve higher output with the same number of people, at the lowest cost possible with technology that is low cost and flexible.”
So how do we help people who would have otherwise been put into roles now taken by robots?