Factory of the Future

Irwin Welber

Keynote Speech to the 1986 International Symposium on Robot Manipulators: Modelling, Control and Education, 1986

Summary

                  This speech held by Irwin Welber to the 1986 International Symposium on Robot Manipulators: Modelling, Control and Education is a significant thought about the vision he, at the time a Vice-President of AT&T Technologies and President of Sandia Corporation, had on the Factory of Future.

He focuses on the importance of integration, which allows the system to enhance communication within the organization and allows to better understand what are the customer needs and what the system itself is capable, given resources, to make.

Communication is definitely then the hey aspect to ensure success of a the Factory of the Future.

Future manufacturing is often visualized as a large building with many robots carrying out assigned tasks with accuracy and reliability. These robots are then using sensors for collecting data and partially interpret it, they are controlling the system through a knowledge database and rules and an end-effector will accomplish goals and perform the work.

The speaker takes the advantage of this common image people have of the factory of the future to talk about the plant itself as a macro-intelligent machine that must perform successfully within its environment, with its objective of maximizing return on investment while providing quality service that meets the customers’ requirements.

The environment in which the factory is operating is clearly between suppliers and customers, with the latter to be satisfied with service and also an acceptable price, in order to achieve this not only an the market should be recognized, but also competitors should be understood and actions should be taken according to them and laws characterizing the environment in which the plant is operating.

The marketing and sales forces are then seen the sensor system in this machine, they have the eyes to observe the data of the environment and they can store it for future use, this knowledge must be updated continuously and effectively, therefore sales and marketing must have direct access to central informatic system to which the rest of the system can have access.

The communication again among the overall system appears to be necessary in order to fill the knowledge database and of course also in order to make use of it once decision have to be taken.

The control system of this machine is then where the information is processed and decision are taken through decision rules and models bringing in the system a proper balance so that key issues can be taken such as: how to map and recall interpreted knowledge of the environment, how to represent some of the available knowledge collected, hot to reason with incomplete or inconsistent information, how to make predictions and how to chose among them?

Once the decision is taken then it has to be done and therefore the end-effector subsystem of the this macro-machine come into function. The objective is then to maximize service while minimizing idle time.

Robots come in in this part of the subsystem, they have to be intelligent machines capable of carrying task with a certain amount of flexibility, accuracy and reliability, they will have to work through sensors, control systems and an end-effector, reproducing in fact the macro-system in smaller scale.

Robot will have to carry not only blue-collar tasks (such as loading/unloading and other production related tasks), but also white-collar tasks, specially in regard of quality control.

People in this kind of “Factory of the Future” will not disappear, but will be called to cover supervisory functions and play a number of different roles also in the end-effector subsystem.

Key Concepts

Factory of the Future.