09/13 Automation: Walking with robots

A new generation of ambulatory machines is striding to market

THEY MIGHT appear cutesy, but a pair of robots that turned up recently at the Ford Motor Company’s Van Dyke Transmission Plant, in Detroit, are practical working machines. They may, indeed, point to the future of automation. Putting robots into factories is hardly a new idea—some 2.4m of them are already at work in plants around the world. But most of these are little more than giant arms, bolted firmly to the ground, that weld and paint things. Those few that have the mobility to manage tasks like delivering components do so by scooting along on wheels. The new devices at Van Dyke are rather different sorts of beasts. They can walk.

This pair of bright-yellow quadrupeds look a bit like dogs, prompting one to be nicknamed Fluffy and the other Spot (which latter moniker is also the official name given to this model of robot by the firm that manufactures them, Boston Dynamics, a subsidiary of SoftBank). The pair are not there to amuse the factory’s human workers, though, but rather to perform an important task that Ford hopes will save it a ton of money. With laser scanners mounted on their backs, Fluffy and Spot can scamper around the 200,000 square-metre plant collecting data. Those data will be employed to build a detailed computer model of the entire manufacturing operation. This sort of model is called a digital twin, and Ford’s engineers will use it to work out how to rearrange the production line to produce a new gearbox.

Over the years, factory plans get out of date as things are moved around and new equipment is brought in. Surveying the transmission plant by hand would take weeks and cost some $…