Robotics Coming for Simple Human Tasks and Pink Gorillas: Automate 2025

Robots typically excel at structured, repeatable tasks such as welding body panels together for cars or painting those vehicles. They've long struggled with more variable, less-structured work such as putting the final trim and finish pieces on finished cars and trucks.

Automakers have been chasing that target since at least the early 1980s when General Motors launched its Saturn brand in hopes of creating fully automated assembly. And more recently, Tesla strugged to get Model 3 vehicles out of its California plant because it tried using robots for jobs that really called for people. 

However, several tech companies at the Automate Show in Detroit are promising that robots are now ready for unstructured work. As evidence, they've displayed several new robots handling human-like tasks.

Slowly.

Very slowly.

So, slow that the natural question isn't whether or not robots can do these jobs, it's whether they should. If a person can do a job in 10 seconds, does it make any sense to use a robot to do it in 30 seconds? 

Leaders at robotics platform provider Vention and computing chip giant Nvidia say yes.