I was stunned when I first met the collaborative Robot Sawyer at the Imagine 2030 Supply Chain Insights Summit in September this year. All I could think was how many jobs will these guys take. The list of features is awesome but for me the three pivotal features were:
- Sawyer doesn’t need to be programmed to do a task, you show it.
- Sawyer can safely operate alongside human workers, without light curtains or guard rails
- I was expecting Sawyer to cost $300K. I was shocked to find that he starts at $29K
Together with Sawyer’s big brother Baxter, these bad boys are set to make a real difference in production, giving manufacturing companies a very competitive advantage.
Tractica anticipates the global robotics industry is expected to surpass US 151 billion by 2020, annual robot unit shipments will increase from 8.8 million in 2015 to 61.4 million by 2020, with more than half the volume in that year coming from consumer robots.