Clocking on with a ‘cobot’ – how the future of manufacturing will need tech-enabled humans

Workers at a BMW plant in South Carolina were given a possible glimpse of the future of car manufacture this summer. For what was apparently the first time, a humanoid robot reported for work. Given that Forbes’ coverage of the event did not focus on what the robot, made by Figure in Oregon, actually does at the factory, this could be seen as more of a training experience for the self-learning unit. 

Figure is not alone. Apptronik, a University of Texas spinout, recently announced that its humanoid robot, Apollo, was being evaluated to work at an American distribution hub run by logistics business GXO. Adding to the excitement, Tesla is expected to release the third generation of its Optimus humanoid robot at the end of 2024, and Boston Dynamics has just unveiled its new Atlas equivalent. 

There is just one problem with these developments, according to Romain Moulin, CEO of warehouse robotics company Exotec. At least as far as warehouse work is concerned, Moulin says that the current buzz is little more than hype, partly driven by Elon Musk’s evangelism. 

“Developing humanoid robots is like trying to design planes to flap their wings; it’s not the most cost-effective or efficient solution to a problem,” he says.

“Just like the buzz around drone delivery a few years ago, this too will gradually fade away. Warehouse robotics is a highly competitive field, leaving no room for solutions that aren’t the most cost-efficient.”

“Developing humanoid robots is like trying to design planes to flap their wings”

Romain Moulin, Exotec

The International Federation of Robotics certainly concentrates on a more realistic future. It recently reported that while humanoid robots are a potential development, the major trend to watch out for is ‘cobots’, or robots that work alongside humans. These now account for a tenth of the half-a-million units installed each year. ‘Cobots’ are not humanoid but are rather smart machines, built, typically, to handle goods, carry out welding jobs or assemble products alongside other workers in a factory.

It is guiding the interaction between robotic machinery and humans that will shape the move from Industry 4.0, where digital tech builds smart factories, to Industry 5.0, where humans and robots will seamlessly work alongside each other in automated facilities.

Coordination and standardisation

While Industry 5.0 is an exciting future to head for, it is fair to say that most manufacturers are still focused on the short- to mid-term future of Industry 4.0 and its potential benefits. Research from Bain & Company shows the current progress as well as roadblocks. The journey towards smarter factories is already well underway, with 60% of manufacturers already investing in AI and robotic tools and achieving a 30% leap in productivity as a result. However, Bain & Company’s judgement is that even when manufacturers do invest, most are still missing out on 30-50% of the potential gains. This is because of siloed thinking, according to Jörg Gnamm, senior partner and global head of Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 Practice at Bain & Company.

His co-authored report makes for sobering reading for those talking about space-age humanoid robots joining workers on the assembly line. Too often departments do not coordinate with others, so gains made in one area are not shared with another. This means that on Bain & Company’s six-stage maturity scale of the path to full automation, most are currently working towards stage 3: to embed standardised lean processes. Even the ‘lighthouse’ factories that are ahead of the rest are at stage 4, where digitalisation assists human decision-making. This is still some way off stage 5, where systems can make smart decisions on their own, and stage 6, where smart systems autonomously organise themselves to work more efficiently. 

Gnamm contends that the way forward is for companies to start taking proactive steps to standardise processes and then to begin applying AI to help explore improvements. The advice comes with a warning, though. Companies that are not already advanced on this journey will continue to fall behind their rivals in Asia, particularly China. 

“Manufacturers have to fix the business first, and then invest in AI to take them to the stage of being autonomous where factories are self-organising and processes are self-optimising,” he says.

“Everybody needs to know what this future for their factory looks like. The problem I see is that Europe is way too relaxed on this. In China, it’s different. There, it’s not just the global giants that you’d expect that are pushing ahead towards full automation, it’s the local Chinese businesses too. Europe has a lot of catching up to do if it is to remain competitive.”

The benefits of digital twins

To establish this vision of the future, with factories run more efficiently and sustainably, companies are turning to digital twins. These have been available to manufacturers for several years, using machine learning to build a digital version of a factory so they can understand a plant better and forecast the impact of potential changes. This may mean testing out a new way of bringing materials to a part of the assembly line, or altering a process to reduce waste. With a digital twin, companies can role-play scenarios to see on screen what impact the suggested move might have on the intended process as well as the wider factory.

Their use is growing so rapidly that Fortune Business Insights predicts today’s $17bn digital twins market will be worth $259bn by 2032, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just under 40%.

Frances Sneddon, CTO at simulation company SIMUL8, reveals manufacturers are seeing major gains using digital twins. By monitoring machinery better to predict when preemptive maintenance is required and also understanding the cause of bottlenecks on the shop floor, so they can be avoided, GM Holden (an Australian subsidiary of General Motors) has improved annual throughput by 5%. The same process, with the addition of altering shift patterns, has enabled Hewlett Packard to save $100,000 a year. 

According to Sneddon, the advent of AI is bringing in the next stage of digital twins. Rather than flag up an issue, they will instead fix it.

“Digital twins are currently used for everyday questions, such as, ‘What’s the right staffing rota? What’s the right maintenance schedule? Do I need to buy one machine or two?’” she says.

“If I’m buying a second machine to solve a bottleneck, will I just move it to another part of the process – and if so, how can I tackle that? It’s currently used to guide people to make these big decisions, but where you can already start to see it going is actually [to] start automatically making everyday decisions that help automate a factory, such as drawing up staff rotas, ordering supplies and so on.”

This future – of digital twins making decisions and improving the efficiency of factories, or even designing them – is about to start taking shape, literally, in front of executives’ eyes. Richard Allmendinger, Professor of Applied Artificial Intelligence and Associate Dean for Business Engagement at Manchester Business School, is working at the vanguard of where AI is going to take digital twins. This includes helping to build AI-driven simulations where manufacturers can take a virtual tour of a suggested new facility, or improve a process before it is implemented.

“We are heading towards digital twins with virtual reality and augmented reality,” he says. 

“We have one in Manchester, costing more than a million pounds. It’s like going into a cave with more than 70 screens, and you can also wear VR goggles. You can design a factory, or a large piece of infrastructure such as an airport, and if you don’t like an element or a process, you change it and then see how that looks and operates.”

Sustainability and the Internet of Things

One of the fundamental aspects of future manufacturing will be not just how things are made, but also, what is made. If the UK is to lead in sustainability, products will need to be redesigned to move away from the fossil fuel era, made from more environmentally-friendly materials and powered by electricity and, possibly, hydrogen. This involves developing processes that reduce waste as well as materials that are more sustainable, such as composites being developed at the National Composites Centre in Bristol, one of seven specialist facilities in the UK operated by the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HMVC).

Among many projects, it has been using IoT (Internet of Things) sensors to offer real-time feedback on the process of making composite materials. This ensures the elements are added at the right time, under the right conditions, and the final item is made efficiently with as little waste as possible. Gareth Williams, HMVC’s director of strategic development, believes this real-time monitoring is essential in a future where we will need to make better-performing, lighter, and more sustainable materials. 

“We see many sectors are reluctant to change to new technology because they are concerned about operational performance”

Gareth Williams, HMVC

“We’ve been working on advanced manufacturing techniques, especially in making composites where we use sensors that can decide how the process progresses,” he says.

“In any manufacturing environment, it’s difficult and costly to control all the environmental conditions. With composites, you’ve got temperature, humidity, and contaminants that can enter in a manufacturing process. You’re trying to control all that within certain parameters, so you ideally want to have something that can respond and adjust itself or that can actually respond to the environment and adjust without needing mechanical intervention.”

This automation in the creation of complex composites, which are making the next generation of more environmentally-friendly and better-performing products, is likely to carry on into their testing and everyday use. Williams predicts that just as IoT sensors will be central to making a product, they will also play a vital role in testing and performance-monitoring beyond the factory gate.

“We see many sectors are reluctant to change to new technology because they are concerned about operational performance,” Williams adds.

“With oil and gas industries, for example, they’ve had bits of steel at the bottom of the ocean for decades, they’ve got real-life data on how it corrodes and performs in those environments. To switch to composites, you have to find a way to bridge that gap, you have to have an alternative. Linking the digital environment to a physical environment is going to be really important.”

This link will provide a continual learning curve, he believes, that will allow new products built from novel (often composite) materials to keep on being improved and help with certification and adoption.

5G for safety-first collaboration

The future of manufacturing, then, is going to be reliant on communications to provide real-time data for machines so they can operate at maximum efficiency and reduce waste to boost sustainability. 

Dr Aparajithan Sivanathan, who leads UKTIN’s 5G Factory of the Future Testbed programme, claims this means that 5G not only makes the automation of Industry 4.0 possible, but will also pave the way for Industry 5.0. In this next era, people and robotic equipment, including ‘cobots’, will work alongside one another. Although many will see the prospect of smarter working as attractive, it will be the safety of robots and autonomous vehicles working alongside humans where 5G will come into its own. This is because 5G’s low latency allows systems to make fast decisions, and the technology’s high bandwidth makes high-definition video possible. Imagery combined with data will allow for real-time data decisions as well as monitoring for possible accidents and workers who look tired, Sivanathan predicts. 

“With the introduction of robots and automated guided vehicles, factories are becoming complex human/machine shared spaces with potential risks emerging,” he says.

“Such close working side-by-side can potentially be hazardous for workers. 5G’s low latency is the fundamental element for real-time autonomous control, enabling interactions between human and machine to operate seamlessly, safely, and more effectively. Advanced connectivity allows for robots to be able to rapidly respond to their surrounding environments and for tele-operation of autonomous vehicles in the case of an emergency situation.”

Research shows that, in the main, British companies are equally bullish about the prospects of 5G. Cradlepoint figures suggest that 42% of businesses see 5G investments as a way to increase automation and 47% agree the technology is fundamental in maintaining the UK’s position as a “leading tech powerhouse”. Across a wide range of industries, 5G was seen as essential for the VR world of the metaverse (32%) as well as robotics and automation (30%) and 3D printing (29%). It is this confidence in the technology that led the (previous) government to suggest 5G adoption could add £155bn worth of productivity benefits to UK industry by 2035, prompting the launch of a £40m fund to encourage 5G innovation.

Despite this positivity, more than two in three businesses were revealed by Cradlepoint to believe the country is investing too little in 5G. When it comes to their own barriers to adoption, nearly one in three companies (32%) reveal skills levels are holding them back, and only a minority (37%) of businesses are aware of government schemes they can approach for technology and funding advice.

Before the decade is over, 5G should be making way for 6G. When global standards are agreed in 2026, it is expected to offer latency far below the current 1 to 5 milliseconds and take speeds up from gigabytes per second to terabytes per second. The University of Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab has been granted £12m by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to work with partners to develop and industrialise 6G solutions. The project is called REASON (Realising Enabling Architectures and Solutions for Open Networks) and involves three major mobile network equipment vendors: Ericsson, Samsung, and Nokia.

Project lead Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, director of the Smart Internet Lab and co-director of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute at the University of Bristol, reveals the work will shape how manufacturers will be able to ensure smooth workflows in the future.

“Our project, REASON, is engaging a consortium of partners representing the entire telecoms R&D ecosystem, including leading UK universities, large equipment vendors, service and content providers, and innovative SMEs,” she says.

“REASON will address key technological challenges of delivering end-to-end open network solutions, considering all segments of the network. The project will pursue breakthroughs on elevating bottlenecks of current systems, such as interoperability, agility, sustainability, resilience, and security, and will position UK-born technologies as candidates for delivering future solutions.”

Closing the technology gap

This government-funded work is encouraging, but in the shorter term, Make UK – the membership organisation that supports the manufacturing industry – is calling on the new government for investment and training support. Its senior policy manager, Nina Gryf, believes that while many manufacturers expected to see a massive productivity gain from Industry 4.0, there has been a widespread feeling that digital gains have not been fully achieved. This is felt particularly strongly in SMEs who may not have a full understanding of the digital and robotic technology already available to them, nor the new opportunities offered by AI. 

On a positive note, Make UK’s research shows that the technology gap is closing. In 2022, it found that although two in three manufacturers revealed past digital investments had paid off, around one in five were not planning to invest in new digital technology or robotics. This November, though, Make UK is expected to reveal that this proportion has halved to one in ten in just two years. 

“Manufacturers need better information on the technology that could help them to become more productive as well as help closing the skills gap”

Nina Gryf, Make UK

This is encouraging, but Gryf says the two main barriers to full adoption of digital tools remain education on what is available, and a shortage in skills to integrate and run smarter manufacturing systems. She believes the new government can play a major role in helping to show manufacturers what is available as well as encouraging young, tech-savvy people to consider a role in the industry.

“Manufacturers need better information on the technology that could help them to become more productive as well as help closing the skills gap,” Gryf says.

“There’s a national Make Smarter programme that is rolling out across parts of the country, which is helping manufacturers to understand where they might need help and which technologies could make them more efficient. But we need the new government to offer better tax incentives on investing in that new technology. We also really need tax breaks on training because manufacturing has quite an older demographic, we need to attract people with digital skills as well as continuously train people already in the industry.”

It is only with this help, she believes, that the smart automation benefits promised by the era of Industry 4.0 can be delivered and the foundations of people and robots working alongside each other in Industry 5.0 can be built. Her position is common among manufacturing experts who share a desire for businesses to be empowered to discover the tech advances that are already available to them and to have better access to the skills to select, install, and integrate them into the factories.

A humanoid robot in the reception foyer will always be a good photo opportunity, but the future of manufacturing is going to be built around the digital tools that deliver smarter, more automated factories. These include digital twins and the AI advances that are on the verge of empowering software to make its own decisions, all connected by 5G telecoms, and later 6G. The tools are largely available – what is needed, according to Make UK, is for the new government to show it is fully committed to devising new tax breaks and skills initiatives, to make funding and bringing digital elements together simpler and more cost-effective.