TOKYO — Japanese robot makers have begun pushing advanced models that can work side by side with people on production lines, seeing growing demand among manufacturers concerned about crowded factories turning into COVID-19 hotbeds.

In contrast to conventional industrial robots, which operate at high speeds and must be kept away from human workers for safety reasons, these so-called collaborative robots move more slowly and can detect and avoid people. They have grown in popularity amid the pandemic, sharply boosting productivity while letting employees avoid working close to one another.

Fanuc plans to ramp up production in 2021 of its new CRX line of collaborative robots, first rolled out in June. It will triple current monthly output at its main factory in Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture but has not disclosed specific production numbers.

Mitsubishi Electric has installed dozens of its own collaborative robots across its production facilities in Japan, Europe and North America. It aims to sell 1,000 units a year at 4 million yen ($37,600) each, though the price has been cut to 2 million yen for this month.

The company has already received orders from food companies for robots that can handle such tasks as putting packaged items into boxes. The robots can accommodate cameras, hands and other attachments developed by customers to facilitate use in a wide variety of settings.

Shibaura Machine will begin selling robots in 2021 that feature arms attached to a torsolike structure, enabling them to tighten screws, for example. The company expects demand from home appliance manufacturers.

The pandemic is pushing manufacturers to try to avoid what the Japanese government calls the “three C’s”: closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings — which can promote the spread of the virus. Many are assigning robots to tasks for which they previously relied on humans.

U.S. research firm MarketsandMarkets sees the worldwide market for industrial robots swelling eightfold from 2020 to $7.97 billion by 2026.

Danish company Universal Robots boasts a 50%-plus share of the global market for collaborative robots, while Japanese players have lagged behind. With demand expected to rise in China — already the world’s largest buyer of industrial robots — as labor grows harder to come by, competition to stay on the cutting edge is sure to be intense.

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The king of awe-inspiring viral videos, Boston Dynamics is continuing its push to commercialize its agile robot creations with a new pilot program at Ford. The car-maker will be leasing two robotic dogs, known as Spot, for its Van Dyke Transmission Plant.

The dogs will be on something of a short leash, guided by handler Paula Wiebelhaus, who uses a controller and will personally monitor the bots in operation. Painted bright yellow, the quadruped robots will each carry five cameras and two hours worth of battery power and will walk the floor capturing plant data and dimensions that will eventually be used to retool the line. In the future, the robots could be used to perform this task autonomously.

“We design and build the plant. After that, over the years, changes are made that rarely get documented,” says Mark Goderis, Ford’s digital engineering manager. “By having the robots scan our facility, we can see what it actually looks like now and build a new engineering model. That digital model is then used when we need to retool the plant for new products.”

Scanning physical spaces is a job well-suited to robots. Other robots — even other dog-shaped robots — are used for similar purposes. Aided by a partnership with Lenovo, UK-based React Robotics has a four-legged robotic helper called DogBot designed specifically for the construction sector, though with potential applications in other industries. Like spot, DogBot is a mobile sensor platform that can autonomously navigate spaces utilizing machine learning algorithms for locomotion, perception, and proprioception. 

According to Ford, the Spot deployments could save the company $300,000 per year, which is the cost of manually scanning the giant facility.

“We used to use a tripod, and we would walk around the facility stopping at different locations, each time standing around for five minutes waiting for the laser to scan,” Goderis recalls. “Scanning one plant could take two weeks. With Fluffy’s help, we are able to do it in half the time.” 

In line with larger sector trends, Boston Dynamics designed Spot to be application agnostic, outfitting it with baseline capabilities to perform multiple duties. As a result, the company is celebrating early deployments in a number of use cases. In one deployment, a construction firm in Canada used a Spot robot to automate the capture of thousands of images weekly on a 500,000 square foot building site, creating an ongoing record of progress and enabling the builders to identify growing problems and inefficiencies early.

Amusingly, Ford’s Spot will, at times, catch a lift atop another robot as it sits on its haunches like a robotic king. That small courier robot, known informally as Scouter, will ferry the dog robots up and down the aisles of the plant to conserve the dog’s batteries. 

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