The Robot Revolution

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became the first major industrial robot buyer by ordering more than 50 welders. Today GM has 270 robots, and there are more than 3,000 at work throughout the U.S. The biggest manufacturer, Unimation Inc., of Danbury, Conn., was founded in 1959 and cost its parent company, Condec, at least $12 million before making its first profit in 1975. It now produces 40 Unimate and 15 Puma robots a month, and will have estimated sales this calendar year of $42 million. Its chief competitor: Cincinnati Milacron, which makes the sophisticated T3 robot and expects 1980 sales of $32 million. It will soon open a new plant in Greenwood, S.C. Sprouting up are newcomers like Automatix Inc., of Burlington, Mass., which was founded last year with $6 million from, among others, Harvard and M.I.T. Giants like IBM and Texas Instruments are weighing the advantages of getting in on the prospective bonanza. Overall, the fledgling U.S. robot industry is producing about 1,500 units per year and is projecting sales of $90 million this year. Wall Street analysts predict a growth on the order of 35% a year throughout the 1980s. That gives the industry a sales potential of more than $2 billion by 1990. Boosters talk of $4 billion.

Spurring U.S. manufacturers is the fact that foreign competitors are already ahead in many ways and fighting to dominate the future. Chief among them are the Japanese, who imported their first Unimates in 1967 and now operate most of the robots in the world (about 10,000, compared with the 3,000 in the U.S. and about the same number in Western Europe-). They are also outproducing the U.S. in robots at a rate of at least 5 to 1. Like many troubled U.S. executives, General Electric's Julius Mirabal recalls going to Japan in 1976 to compare production techniques. He found robots everywhere, including one cluster that had reduced the work force in a vacuum-cleaner plant from several hundred men to eight. "Unless we start doing something to increase U.S. productivity, the United States will be out of business as a country," says Mirabal, who returned from Japan to find that GE was using only ten robots; today it has 111. The auto industry now buys about 40% of industrial robots, both in the U.S. and worldwide, but electrical firms have also become major users.

The Japanese, meanwhile, are resolutely pressing forward. In January Fujitsu Fanuc will open a new $38 million plant in which robots will work 24 hours a day to produce more robots (100 a month). "The danger in letting Japan get so far ahead," says Paul Gosset, who helped develop robots for France's Renault, "is that they may end up being the ones who make the modules and parts that go into everyone else's robots."

Webster's definition of a robot begins by describing it as "a machine in the form of a human being that performs the mechanical functions of a human being." Today's robotmakers, however, are devoting very little thought to creating anything that looks or acts human. It is perfectly possible to design a robot that walks on artificial legs or speaks fluent English, but it is much cheaper and more efficient to keep the robot standing in one place and to speak to it in the soothing language of algorithms. Says David Nitzan of SRI International: "We're creating an image of a robot in the way Picasso redistributed the features of a human