A Fanuc robot demonstrates its reach and dexterity by handling a basketball at the Automate Show in Detroit on May 24, 2023. A humanoid warehouse worker, Digit walked upright on goatlike legs and grabbed bins off a shelf with muscular arms made from aerospace-grade aluminum. It then placed the boxes on an assembly line and walked back to the shelf to search for more.
“I don’t think people really understand where we are,” he told me. “We’re just scratching the surface.” Over the last few years, significant resources have been thrown at making robots profitable — and this is paying off. More companies are competing to solve the problems that have traditionally come with automation, and many are succeeding.
The United States has its own problems with aging workers, however, especially in heavy industries like manufacturing, where baby boomers form an outsize part of the workforce. ProMat’s 51,000 attendees — a glad-handing throng of well-groomed, middle-aged white male faces attached to monogrammed backpacks and fancy sneakers — ambled from one exhibit to the next like visitors at a zoo. The crowd included buyers from major retailers and consumer goods companies, as well as venture capitalists and engineers.
Kyslinger, who grew up in western Pennsylvania and was a curveball-throwing right-hander for the University of Pittsburgh, majored in computer science in college. Practice was at 5 a.m., so he got up at 3:30 and went to the computer lab. For Kyslinger, who today lives near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, working for a Japanese car company was a formative experience. He admired what he saw as Japanese culture’s disciplined approach to complex problems and wrote a master’s thesis on the different working environments at Honda and Ford.
Nevertheless, somewhat begrudgingly, he pointed out some highlights: A robotic arm with a kind of gripper that approached the versatility of human fingers. A visual sensor that had made progress in discerning the glare on a plastic wrapper from an object it contained. A sorter that excelled at finding the ideal geometry inside a cardboard box for items of different shapes, whether “toothpaste, tuna fish or a teddy bear.
Its writhing octopus-like appendages were hypnotic, but as soon as we started watching it, one of its “end effectors” failed to grip a box of Q-Tips and dropped it on the floor, where the autonomous mobile robot ran over it.