There are some robots that are ready for work in F&B, but the hype that surrounds humanoid robots makes it tough to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fantasy.
This is an early version of Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot that uses hydraulics (and continues to leak fluid). While we saw the updated version that is all electric and only for research, we were not allowed to photograph it.
According to the hype of 2018, there shouldn’t be a steering wheel in my car right now because our electric vehicles should be autonomously ferrying us around. We can clearly see that hasn’t happened, but it brings up an important point about hype and recognizing what’s immediately available and what’s still yet to come, especially as it relates to robots in food and beverage manufacturing. Some of you in the ProFood World audience may have already had someone in your organization asking why something they’ve seen online isn’t in your facility. The reality is: It’s not ready yet.
I used to write for a magazine that covered autonomous and electric vehicles. I received the hype firsthand about how we were this close to not only having electric cars ferry us around autonomously, but how we could then hop out of the car into an eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) and avoid ground-based traffic entirely. Admittedly, it was very convincing, but that type of hype has the potential to gaslight people into thinking that something is available right now. The tech world moves so fast that it’s easy to convince oneself that fiction could in fact be reality.
There’s one company, and one person in particular, in the automotive or tech space that’s especially good at driving hype. That hype, in turn, drives market share and improves the company’s valuation. It’s a strategy that helps to get this company more investors that fund projects, some of which may even be what’s being hyped. The problem is that how the tech space operates is so much different from food and beverage.
Food and beverage isn’t the tech industry
Think about alternative protein as an example. There are companies in that space that received investments due to the tech-heavy nature of certain products. Many of those investors also came from the tech space. Those investors wanted quick returns on their investments. The returns didn’t come very quickly because food and beverage traditionally works much more slowly than, well, most industries. The fallout from this tech-industry take on F&B is still being seen. No, I won’t name names.
The previous paragraph isn’t meant to be a slight against alternative protein, the types of investments that have happened in the space, or a critique on companies that have employed this strategy. It’s simply a means to highlight how F&B is a completely different industry from tech.
Given the workforce troubles that have plagued manufacturing in the U.S., it’s easy to see how some would want to fill the void with a humanoid robot. After all, isn’t that the logical next step to the type of automation already arriving on shop floors?
As part of OpX Leadership Network's summer meeting, we went to Boston Dynamics. I was either feeling artistic or I was falling over when I took this photo.
It’s a matter of intuition versus code
The problem is that hype has outpaced capability. Though there have been significant advances in robotics, having one working alongside humans or on its own in food and beverage is still at least 5-10 years away. The main reason for this could be any one of the following: cost, safety, capability, availability, but there’s probably an even better reason: intuition. (Although, those who run union shops might still have a hard time putting a humanoid robot to work even if all the previous issues have been worked out.) The best way I can share this discrepancy between a human’s and a humanoid robot’s ability to intuit a situation or task goes back to an old writing/logic exercise that you may have done or heard about: write out the instructions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Many people will often start by saying something like “put peanut butter on a slice of bread.” To most people that sounds perfectly normal, but that’s until you have to actually think about where did the bread come from? Where did the peanut butter come from? Did you open the jar? Do you apply it with your hand or use a knife? Once you think about all the steps it takes to make a PB&J sandwich the human mind recategorizes all these little, seemingly inconsequential steps that we normally take for granted after years and years of experience. Robots, though, don’t have that same level of intuition and instead need to have code written for every single step.
This is Spot with the extendable arm and gripper prior to demonstrating how easily it can move up a flight of stairs.That idea was made abundantly clear while on a recent OpX Leadership tour to Boston Dynamics in July. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, you’ve probably seen the company’s dog-like robot, Spot, and its own humanoid robot, Atlas. During a demonstration, Spot went through the process of opening a door, which had a lever instead of a knob. The robot extended an arm located on its head/back, used grippers to turn the lever, pulled open the door, maneuvered itself so that the door wouldn’t close automatically, pushed the door fully open, passed through the door, grabbed the lever on the other side with its gripper, and pulled the door closed after it.
As cool as it was seeing this happen, it wasn’t exactly a fast process compared to a human opening that same door and going through it. But what really drove home the reality of what we had seen was when the Boston Dynamics’ rep told us that the everyday task we had just seen took many engineers many hours and a lot of code to make happen.
Humanoid robots aren’t ready, but it’s only a matter of time
This is another version of Spot we were shown with a variety of sensors attached to its back in addition to the one on the very front of the chassis.While the OpX leadership in attendance at Boston Dynamics wasn’t allowed to take photos or record Atlas, we were more than welcome to record Spot and Stretch, a third Boston Dynamics robot. In addition to the aforementioned gripper arm, Spot also has sensors—vision, infrared, lidar, and acoustic—that enable it to scan a facility for potential faults in a line or in the facility itself, essentially an inspection robot, while Stretch is used for unloading trucks at a dock. Both of them are in fact being used at high-profile companies today, but most people probably haven’t seen them in use.
Stretch is another robot we saw in action, which is used to unload trucks at a dock.The reason for that is because even though the technology has been worked out, the cost is still a barrier for many small and midsize companies. So even if a humanoid robot had answered all the questions regarding capability and safety (which they haven’t), cost would still be a problem for most. So, there needs to be early adopters for that technology, so why not let the aforementioned auto industry take the lead?
The auto industry definitely has its share of financial concerns at the moment, but many industries could say the same. There’s no need to chase the shiny object right now. Let another industry take the lead, pay the high costs, work out the bugs, and then start investigating if a humanoid robot is right for a food and beverage plant. It’ll certainly happen sooner than automakers taking the steering wheel out of their cars.
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