Google’s Intrinsic Promise Of Democratizing Robots May Fall Short

Alphabet
GOOGL
bought ROS – the open source Robot Operating System project – last year. Now its X incubation, Intrinsic, announced its first product, Flowstate. Its aim is to make robotic programming accessible to everybody. Yet, without a cultural shift, its efforts are likely to be in vain.

The challenge is that most people using these robots in industrial settings, don’t seem to be programming themselves. Startups like Modbot learned that at their peril. Their collaborative robot was designed to be deployable by anyone. Yet, the company faced significant headwinds from companies insisting that automation experts lead deployment. Today, Modbot focuses on services to deploy these robots, instead of empowering operators. This reality of industrial operations is one of the reasons the ROS-Industrial project spun out of the main ROS initiative.

Relying on experts to deploy robotic systems makes their use cases more rigid and the resulting production lines less flexible. That runs counter to the interests of industry, which are desperately trying to inject agility into manufacturing after the pandemic exposed significant supply chain challenges.

Empowering operators to deploy robots is possible, given the right tools. No-code tools powering Robotic Process Automation (RPA), such as Microsoft’s
MSFT
Power Automate, are one example of this. Doing so for physical robots would aid agility, as systems are more easily adapted and redeployed. Yet, managers seem reticent to allow frontline workers to do so.

The failure to empower operators is one of the reasons for the ongoing productivity slump in Europe and North America. “Average annual growth in labour productivity – measured as real GDP per hour worked – in those euro area countries that have sufficiently long time series has continuously declined from about 7% in the 1960s to just 1% since the early 2000s” reports the EU (see Chart 1).

One explanation for this decline is the fact that the successes of large scale automation in the 1960’s and 70’s in industries such as automotive represented low hanging fruit. The focus on lights out manufacturing has become increasingly tedious since then, as operations remain an interwoven mesh of people and machines, that can only be automated to the detriment of profitability and flexibility.

Empowering operators would solve this as shopfloor operators are the ones most likely to identify automation opportunities. There is no question that a significant education effort is required to do so, not only to adopt the tools but to reframe continuous improvement and automation from an expert task to a task for everyone. Yet, the tools to enable this frontline effort have been available for decades, whether RPA, collaborative robots, 3D printing, photogrammetry, or augmented reality, among others.

The slow and arduous adoption of all these tools indicates that the challenge is not technological readiness, but managerial reticence. Managers simply seem culturally incapable of trusting operators. Their insistence on oversight limits potential of these technologies to contribute to flexibility, resilience and productivity.

Intrinsic’s Flowstate does not address this point. Instead, it delivers yet another well-intentioned project to a graveyard littered with Industry 4.0 initiatives. Technology alone will not solve grand challenges. Unless companies like Alphabet understand this, many more projects will be similarly fated. Ultimately shareholders, likely the managers resisting the change, will be the ones who suffer as a result.