Re:Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete
by chrischen on Monday June 11, 2012 @03:31AM
(#4093557)
Has outsourcing manufacturing to developing countries delayed research into robotic manufacturing? Seems like such low-skilled labor is relatively easy to build into robots, but likely the already cheap costs of foreign labor has made it unnecessary to invest in large upfront costs to develop robots.
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Re:Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete
by _delirium on Monday June 11, 2012 @06:14AM
(#4093902)
That's the conventional wisdom among commercial AI-research spinoffs: the fact that you can get such cheap human labor in a globalized labor pool has been a major impediment to commercializing pretty big segments of AI research. The funding agencies even seem to agree, and have been putting quite a bit of funding in recent years into crowdsourcing and "human computation" projects to take advantage of that labor pool, instead of trying to replace it with machines.
Re:Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete
by adventureful on Monday June 11, 2012 @03:35AM
(#4093565)
There are some very interesting companies working on it.
Bezos among others for example are backing Heartland Robotics ($27m or more in VC so far):
http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/
KIVA Systems was / is one of my favorite examples of industrial robot automation that really worked well and demonstrated the ability to significantly improve output. They're obviously not in traditional manufacturing, but they're still a cog in the process.