Benjamin Gibbs

@Robotbeat Nope, IFR stats are just robot arms.

@BGGthoughts 3D printers?

I’m not sure if this includes drones, but the FAA paperwork for a lot of drone use, like agricultural drones, is insane in the US. And still dominated by China (DJI). We’re creating structural barriers to productivity by regulation. Combined with near complete lack of US drones.

@adamgluck @CubedUnit @chris_j_paxton @ReadyRobotics @DanGrover I think it goes deeper than debt though: China can produce a lot more steel a lot cheaper than anyone else, which let's them build a lot more cheap steel robot arms.

@adamgluck @chris_j_paxton @ReadyRobotics @DanGrover I just realized I was looking at an older stat... And China installed 290k robots last year, not 140k.

@Noahpinion I'm curious to see how the density numbers get calculated. All the stats say China has a higher robot density. But the same source of those stats say that: Total robots installed in China: 1,501,535 Total robots installed in USA: 365,052 Still big cause for concern.

Interesting point, but China has zoomed ahead of us in robots per worker.

One other thing to consider when it comes to the narrative around the US not being as good as China when it comes to installing robots: relative size. China employs 128M people in manufacturing. They installed ~140K robots. The US employs 12.1M people in manufacturing. We installed ~40K robots. They have 10x the workforce yet only installed 4x the number of robots. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be doing better, we should be. This is to say that we will never brute force a solution here, we will only get ahead by creating better technology faster than others. So let's get back to building the future @adamgluck @chris_j_paxton @DanGrover

All the complexity adds a whole lot of friction to the process of deploying robots. We're working on solving the software complexity layer here at @ReadyRobotics, but that is only one piece of the puzzle! I deeply believe that solving for the software complexity will significantly reduce the friction of managing robot cells once they're deployed, but we don't have magic technology that solves the friction of the design and implementation. You need a whole team of specialists to deploy a single robot cell. This is why ultimately large enterprises will establish an internal team to build and install robot cells, as well as relying on systems integrators.

I think the real answer here is that we discovered a lot of fundamental platform theories like the Einstein Field Equations and the Dirac Equation that fueled a generation of new science and technologies. We haven't really discovered something that fundamental this century.

This guy is rapidly becoming my new favorite follow on manufacturing Twitter.

@build_boost Conveyors are actually a very interesting segment of the industrial automation sector. Almost always custom. Easy to screw up. Absolutely critical to a lot of automation.

me at 2am this morning

@DanGrover Inertia is strong in the US manufacturing industry, and most aren't on Twitter. If you polled a representative sample, I'd bet good money 80%+ haven't heard of the Gundo or American Dynamism. They just wanna solve their specific production problems. Everything else is noise.

At Automate show and, which there are some changes since prev shows, I am kinda surprised with how little overall has changed in US industrial automation scene, despite all the talk of american dynamism and gundo bros and whatnot.

If you cannot explain something to someone else so they understand it, then you yourself don't really understand it. twitter.com/peteoxenham/st…