Robots marched on in 2021, with record orders by North American firms

By Timothy Aeppel

(Reuters) – Extra robots joined the U.S. workforce final yr than ever earlier than, taking up jobs from plucking bottles and cans off conveyor belts at trash recycling crops to placing small client items into cardboard packing containers at e-commerce warehouses.

It appears like nonetheless extra robots will come aboard in 2022.

Corporations throughout North America laid out greater than $2 billion for nearly 40,000 robots in 2021 to assist them deal with file demand and a pandemic-fueled labor scarcity. Robots went to work in a rising variety of industries, increasing properly past their historic surge within the automotive sector.

“With human labor, what they produce is determined by in the event that they’re hungry or are they drained or have that they had their espresso,” mentioned Brian Tu, chief income officer for DCL Logistics in Fremont, California, which began putting in robots on e-commerce success traces through the pandemic. Robots are dependably quick and don’t take breaks.

Factories and different industrial customers ordered 39,708 robots in 2021, 28% greater than in 2020, based on knowledge compiled by the trade group the Affiliation for Advancing Automation, also referred to as A3. The earlier annual file for robotic orders was set in 2017 – when North American firms ordered 34,904 robots valued at $1.9 billion.

As just lately as 2016, greater than twice as many robots have been offered to auto makers as to all different trade sectors mixed. However in 2020, different companies eclipsed automakers as patrons of the superior machines, and the share of robots going to non-auto firms grew additional in 2021.

A number of the quickest progress in robotic orders is within the metals and meals and client items industries, based on A3.

E-commerce is one other quick progress sector. At DCL, which has 5 U.S. success facilities and can quickly open a sixth, the traces which have gotten robots can function with fewer folks – but produce 200% extra, based on Tu.

“We nonetheless have staff working across the robots,” he added, “however we will cut back labor by roughly half.”

(Graphic: Unemployed to job openings Extra jobs than jobseekers: https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-FED/JOBS/egvbkmeoepq/chart.png)

BRING ON THE ‘COBOTS’

The A3 knowledge principally tracks orders for conventional industrial robots – massive techniques that usually exchange a complete part of an meeting line with shifting arms. However a rising share of robots are a brand new breed of “cobots,” designed to work alongside people on meeting traces.

“The primary driver for automation is the labor scarcity in manufacturing,” mentioned Joe Campbell, a senior supervisor for purposes growth at Common Robots, a unit of Massachusetts-based Teradyne Inc, which makes a speciality of cobots. And the pandemic is just not the one issue driving the change. Common estimates 2,000 Child Boomers are retiring every day in manufacturing, robbing manufacturing facility flooring of veteran experience.

Campbell mentioned cobots are making inroads into many industries that lengthy resisted automation. In development, for example, the corporate has offered robotic arms to a agency that makes use of them to put in drywall in massive constructing tasks: a notoriously labor-intensive course of.

Auto crops are additionally discovering new makes use of for cobots. Stellantis N.V., the Dutch automaker, is now utilizing Common’s cobots within the ultimate meeting space of its manufacturing facility in Turin, Italy, to assist produce the brand new Fiat 500 electrical automobile. The arms are hooked up to a framework that strikes over the automobile, the place they find and fasten nuts, mentioned Campbell.

Whereas auto crops have used robots for many years to do jobs like weld metallic, he mentioned, it’s “very new” for cobots to do ultimate meeting jobs.

Final week, Tesla Inc Chief Govt Elon Musk mentioned his engineers would launch a humanoid robotic referred to as Optimus in its factories subsequent yr. Within the brief time period, Musk mentioned these robots may carry gadgets round a manufacturing facility and will finally deal with labor shortages.

As of December, U.S. employers had 10.9 million vacant positions, nominally under the file 11.1 million from earlier in 2021. There are actually an unprecedented 1.7 open jobs for each unemployed employee, and not less than one policymaker on the Federal Reserve – St. Louis Fed President James Bullard – sees the U.S. unemployment price dropping under 3% this yr for the primary time for the reason that Nineteen Fifties.

“By no means say by no means,” mentioned Common Robots’ Campbell, “however I don’t see something to gradual us down.”

(Reporting by Timothy Aeppel; Modifying by Dan Burns and David Gregorio)