When researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology visited Rich Gent's machine shop here to see how automation was spreading to America's small and medium-sized factories, they expected to find robots.
"In big factories - when you're making the same thing over and over, day after day, robots make total sense," said Gent, who with his brother runs Gent Machine Co, a 55-employee company founded by his great-grandfather, "but not for us."
Anna Waldman-Brown, a PhD student who worked on the report with MIT Professor Suzanne Berger, said she was "surprised" by the lack of the machines. Nick Pinkston, CEO of Volition, a San Francisco company that makes software used by robotics engineers to automate factories, said smaller firms lack the cash to take risks on new robots. "They think of capital payback periods of as little as three months, or six - and it all depends on the contract" with the consumer who is ordering parts to be made by the machine.
To be sure, robots are spreading to more corners of the industrial economy, just not as quickly as the MIT researchers and many others expected. Last year, for the first time, most of the robots ordered by companies in North America were not destined for automotive factories - a shift partly attributed to the development of cheaper and more flexible machines. Those are the type of machines especially needed in smaller operations.
"We're getting another machine delivered in September - and hope to attach a robot arm to that one to load and unload it," he said. But there are some tasks where the technology remains too rigid or simply not capable of getting the job done.
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