UNIQLO Wants To Use Robots To Transform Factories, But Making Clothes Is Still Inseparable From People.

The topic of "robot replacing human work" is discussed several times a year. In the past, it mainly took place in the production workshop of automobiles, mobile phones and other technology products. Now more and more industries intend to introduce automatic production lines. Does this mean that more people will lose their jobs?

According to the Daily Mail, UNIQLO's factory in Japan has been fully automated, and the packaging of clothes is basically done by robots.

The robot used by UNIQLO is called "Intelligent Piece Packing Robot", which is developed by Japanese startups Mujin, which is specially used for folding and packing textiles.

It can be seen from the video that these robots can skillfully put the clothes neatly into the box through the suction cups at the end of the mechanical arm, and do not damage the plastic packaging of the clothes, but also put the paper documents into the packaging individually. This requires more precise control of the intensity and visual recognition of the computer.

In fact, as early as 2018, UNIQLO launched an automated system in a warehouse in Tokyo, which was responsible for the inspection and sorting of clothes in the warehouse. This is also the first "robot warehouse" of UNIQLO. UNIQLO said that the system can replace 90% of the manpower, and it can run continuously for 24 hours.

It is reported that UNIQLO produces 1 billion 300 million pieces of clothing every year and sells them to 3500 stores in 26 different countries around the world, and there are many styles and materials. If the packaging robot can be used in large scale, it will save many costs for UNIQLO.

But at present, this robot can only use clothes to pack such a difficult link. In the production process that is more cumbersome and manpower cost occupies a higher proportion, the robot is powerless.

This situation is not just in the clothing industry. Adidas has opened two robot factories Speedfactory in 2016 and 2017, trying to use robot to produce sports shoes, retaining only a small number of technical positions.

According to Adidas's assumption, robotics factories can automatically improve their production efficiency by using 3D printing, mechanical arm and computer weaving technology. They can not only improve production efficiency, but also deliver shoes faster than the standard industrial production time, and can quickly meet the needs of consumers' customization. 36.

However, Adidas has closed the two robotics factories this year, because the shoes produced by these two robot factories are very limited. If we want to produce more styles of sports shoes, it will take a higher cost to achieve them, even higher than manual production.

In fact, the application of robots in manufacturing is very common. For example, the robot arm that screws the screws on the automobile production line, why is it difficult to achieve such automated assembly line in clothing and footwear industries?

Pipeline production mode was first popularized in the automotive industry. The extensive application of robots in the manufacturing industry also started from the automotive industry. This fact is closely related to the characteristics of the automobile manufacturing industry. Automobile manufacturing has the characteristics of large production, high standardization, and clear division of the production line.

Because many car parts can be universal, and the output of a car is often low. Those less flexible arms can be applied to vehicle production on a large scale.

Now the robot production line is also used in 3C digital products, such as smart phones. These products also have many similarities with cars. Taking smart phones as an example, the higher automation level in the production process is dispensing, precision mounting, precision pressing, locking screws and so on, because the technical difficulty of these links is relatively low, and even if the phone is updated for several generations, it can continue to use as long as the parameters are adjusted.

In the whole assembly process, it is still more dependent on manpower. The process involved in welding, cycloidal, shell closing, clean display screen, sticking lenses, testing and testing, as well as the feeding and fitting of accessories, is more difficult to automate.

In addition, the update of smart phones is more and more frequent. Many manufacturers have begun to develop products such as folding screens and surround screens. The existing automated assembly lines have not been able to meet the demand, because individuation is the biggest enemy of robot production standardization and scale, so that automation equipment adapting to flexible production has become the biggest problem of mobile phone manufacturing automation.

It is not difficult to understand why clothing and footwear manufacturing is more difficult to achieve automated production. Clothes and footwear are much faster and more fashionable than mobile phones. To create a machine that can meet different styles of clothing production is still difficult to achieve, but if it is only part of the production style, it is difficult to achieve large-scale production, and the cost may be even higher.

But now the recognition accuracy of mechanical arm is also improving. A robot developed by Eureka Robotics of Singapore's Nanyang Technology University can handle sophisticated optical lenses as well as human hands, and the mechanical arm developed by OpenAI has been able to solve magic cube by self-learning.

This means that robots in the future may not only be able to accomplish specific tasks, but can learn many skills like human beings through learning. This may enable large-scale automation pipelines to be applied to more industries, so that our clothes, shoes, mobile phones and other daily necessities are entirely built by robots.