On this side of the recession, robots have become a fairly common sight in factories across the U.S. According to the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), there are some 225,000 robots at work in U.S. factories today, putting the nation second only to Japan in terms of robot usage. However, this number represents only a fraction of the total possible market.
Scaling Back the Wishlist
According to Manfred Gundel, CEO of KUKA Robotics, "To encourage 'unexperienced' small and medium-sized companies to invest in automation, they need solutions which are on the one hand 'easy to use' but on the other hand also flexible, fast, precise and energy-saving to ensure the increase of production on high-level quality."
Coming from a large manufacturing perspective, this is no easy task to fill. Bringing the high-speed, articulate work of automotive robots to the small shops -- and doing so in a safe, fence-free manner -- requires significant technology advances that are still years off.
As Visti explains, "It is very difficult to develop a very simple robot if you have a wishlist with more than 100 kinds of features that you want the robot to do." Universal Robots, however, bypassed that difficulty by scaling back that wishlist to the basic functions small and mid-sized companies most frequently require.
"If we can meet just 80% of those applications," he says, "that is good enough for us and it is 99% good enough for the small and medium-sized customers."
In that respect, he says that his company is creating a new niche in the robotics market: a new kind of simple-to-use, safe robots for these underserved manufacturers.
"The robots we have been selling are not taking market shares away from traditional robots," he says. "Instead, we are starting up all new markets."
This, he says, is what the company's robots have provided small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises across Europe and China since 2009 and what it plans to bring to the U.S. as it enters the market this year.
