Industrial Automation in Finland

      3. Please tell us your opinion about automation in the manufacturing sector and the use of robots in the ABB factories in Finland.

The use of automation in the manufacturing sector has been steadily growing in the last decade. More and more operations have been changed to include industrial automation to increase speed or efficiency. While touring the ABB factories, we could see some of the ways that robots are used in the process of creating small electronics.

               Automation in the manufacturing sector is the replacing of human decisions and manual control of an action using mechanical and logical programmed equipment. These machines can be used to provide benefits to a company looking to remove human error or speed up a process. Automation replaces the physical monotony from human workers, allows faster production, can perform tasks beyond human capabilities and can perform some dangerous tasks that humans could not even perform. However, automation has its limitations, most of those revolving around intelligence and costs. A robot is expensive to create and to maintain, faults and failures cause losses in end products, and some tasks are too complex to be automated. These factors combined make it so that the ideal scenario for industrial automation is simple, repetitive actions such as handling, welding, and assembling materials. These systems are beneficial to society, creating opportunity for refinement of the manufacturing process, as well as creating different jobs to maintain the robots or enhance a simple created goods.

               At ABB, there were many robots used all throughout the manufacturing process. The focus of the robots in these factories was precise repetition. One robot that stood out to me was a machine that took completed medium-voltage circuit breakers, registered them, and packed them in boxes. This task could have easily been completed by a human, but by using a robot to perform this monotonous and repetitive task, a human worker could be performing a more demanding task such as moving this completed box to its intended destination.

               Overall, industrial robotics will be a highly important topic in the coming decade as increasingly more tasks are completable using automation. ABB factories are already implementing these robots into their manufacturing process where a simple, cyclical task can be performed much faster and easier for all parties involved.