As Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing marks its 10th anniversary, the staff is looking back on the events and issues that shaped our coverage over our first decade. Read more of our 10 Trends for 10 Years here.
By Karen Hanna
Employees who can work without stopping are steadily taking their places alongside humans on the plant floor.
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), 4,282,000 industrial robots were in plants worldwide last year, compared with 1,472,000 in 2014.
But more than half of robots installed last year were put into operation in China.
Meanwhile, in the first quarter of this year, companies in the U.S. purchased 8,582 robots, valued at $494 million — a 6 percent drop from the same period last year, according to Association for Advancing Automation (A3).
According to the IFR, as of 2023, 90 percent of robots in manufacturing environments were industrial robots, with collaborative robots (cobots) accounting for the rest. In 2017, less than 3 percent of robots were cobots.
While moving without safety guarding, cobots are starting to flex the kinds of muscles once only available on industrial robots. Earlier this year, Epson, for example, launched its C-B cobots, which can operate at industrial speeds, as long as no people are nearby.
“Nobody is buying automation today to put people out of work,” robotics expert Joe Campbell told Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing in 2023. “When I started selling robots 40 years ago, that was the model: You sold automation because the company needed to take labor out. Today, nobody can attract enough workers into manufacturing, so, the name of the game today is to put your skilled workforce into the highest-value operations.”
Across the world, handling leads the way as the most-frequent application by far, followed by welding, assembly and clean-room tasks, according to the IFR.
Alex Shikany, VP of membership and market intelligence for A3, was projecting better sales in the latter part of 2024.
"North American robot orders are showing signs of improvement as we approach the mid-way point of the year," he said. "It's particularly encouraging to see that non-automotive customers are continuing to grow their adoption of robots, demonstrating the expanding reach and impact of automation across various industries.”
Karen Hanna | Senior Staff Reporter
Senior Staff Reporter Karen Hanna covers injection molding, molds and tooling, processors, workforce and other topics, and writes features including In Other Words and Problem Solved for Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing, Plastics Recycling and The Journal of Blow Molding. She has more than 15 years of experience in daily and magazine journalism.
