Want Safer Factory Robots? Make Them More Like Self-Driving Cars
Veo Robotics is using lidar sensors to make industrial robots less threatening to their human colleagues.
A point-cloud image of a robot and an employee rendered by Veo Robotics’ lidar system.
Source: Veo Robotics Inc.
For robot cars to achieve peaceful coexistence with the humans inches away on roads and highways, they must be encased in an invisible halo of laser beams. This same lidar technology is now appearing inside the factories that build cars, letting humans get intimately close to dangerous assembly-line robots.
The shift is so powerful it could help automakers achieve what Detroit couldn’t do in the 1980s and what Tesla Inc. failed to accomplish over the past few years: the complete reinvention of car factories around robots rather than human labor. Most automakers use robots to weld and paint the metal bodies of their cars. But the final assembly line—some 500 complex and ever-changing tasks such as the installation of engines and dashboards and wire harnesses—has defied almost all attempts to replace human workers with robots since General Motors Co. started experimenting with them in 1959.