A Robot Revolution, Good for Business
On Behalf of Mouser Electronics
Good news for anyone who has ever lost part of a weekend in a tire store waiting for their car’s turn in one of the busy service bays: The time needed to change tires is about to be cut by three-fourths. That’s because robots are learning to do it, thanks to a Detroit startup called RoboTire.
The venture is funded largely by giant tire store chain, Discount Tire, among others, but RoboTire’s robots are expected to find work in tire and automotive shops of all types and sizes eventually. “Just think about all the different vehicle-servicing jobs that robots could do,” says Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a major global trade association counting more than 750 robotics and related organizations among its members.
Robots have been helping build cars since General Motors installed the world’s first industrial robot in 1961. The leap from welding doors on an assembly line to changing tires in a local shop is a vast one, however, given the multiple, highly variable steps involved in swapping tires on whatever vehicle pulls into the bay—not to mention the difference in economic scale between a massive factory and a tire store.
This use case is only one small example of the thousands of ways robotics and related industrial automation technology are starting to affect manufacturing and even service businesses of all sizes and types around the world. “Whether it’s for assembling products, boxing goods for shipment, or cleaning up a restaurant kitchen, the need for robots is growing,” says Juan Aparicio, vice president of product at robotics software developer Ready Robotics and a former head of advanced manufacturing automation at Siemens.
Job Creators, Not Killers
Orders for robots from companies across North America climbed to nearly 30,000 in just the first three quarters of 2021. That’s about $1.5 billion in robots, representing an increase of approximately 50 percent over 2020 robot sales for the same time period. What’s more, for the first time ever, orders for robots from outside the automotive industry jumped above orders from automobile companies, making up two-thirds of all orders.
