COMMENT
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Andrew Allcock, Editor
The time is now, surely
The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) has published its
annual report and, once again, the UK finds itself well down the user
country league table. The European average robot use is
114/10,000 factory employees; the UK’s figure is 91/10,000.
Maybe that doesn’t look so bad, but against our industrialised
near competitors in Europe, I am afraid it does. Germany remains
the main user in Europe, with an operational stock of about 221,500 units. That is
some three times the figure for Italy (74,400 units), five times that of France (42,000
units) and about 10 times the UK’s stock (21,700 units).
Now, since the automotive industry is the world’s number one user of robots, the car
production activities of these various countries must be playing their part, although the
UK produced more cars than did Italy in 2019 ( www.is.gd/axijov ). But hold on there,
Sweden posts a robot use figure of 277/10,000 employees, makes just 20% the
number of cars that the UK manages and this is the country that Machinery has been
told is the most likely comparison for this country’s robot use.
Robot suppliers have been bashing on about this poor UK showing for years, saying
that the country should be adopting automation and robots, but little changes from year
to year. What has changed is robot technology, however, plus, in Machinery’s area of
interest, the availability of oven-ready automation solutions from suppliers of machine
tools, rather than via systems integrators.
Industrial robots have become easier to deploy and the introduction in recent years
of collaborative robots, cobots, has opened up even easier implementation (listen to
Machinery’s Universal Robots-sponsored podcasts on the subject of cobots:
www.is.gd/meliha ). Machine tool makers/suppliers have shown interest in both
industrial robots and cobots in creating their own standard automation offerings:
Mazak, Mills CNC, Hurco Europe and XYZ Machine Tools are four. And, certainly,
Machinery is receiving news of automated installations, but it’s hardly a stampede.
It was only just over a year ago that the House of Commons Business, Energy and
Industrial Strategy Committee published ‘Automation and the future of work’
( www.is.gd/qadika ). Any impetus that publication might have had has been dampened
by Covid-19, however. Yet maybe this pandemic is itself a prompt for automation? Many
have said so. Indeed, the UK’s automation body, BARA, carried an article in its latest
magazine ( www.is.gd/fenepi ) suggesting as much: “Crises are often the stimulants to
real innovation and new ways of doing stuff,” the article says. It is the social distancing
aspect that it picks up on in the main, but the IFR figures once again really do shout
that the UK should pull its automation socks up. There is no shortage of standard
solutions on offer today (p10), nor incentives to automate, after all. ■
www.machinery.co.uk
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www.machinery.co.uk | MachineryMagazine | @MachineryTweets | November 2020 7
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