After seeing KUKA robots in action all over BMW yesterday, I was very excited to see the work that goes into making these robots. We arrived at the site which was directly off the train tracks and made our way inside to check in.
We started the visit with a guest talk in front of their own AI agent that you can ask anything to, and he had the agent greet us and the Augsburg student to their facility, it was very cool. Later in the day, when we were on the way out I was asking questions of my own. After the warm welcome, we were taken over for a little intro with two of the biggest robots I have seen in person. It is hard to put into words, but the robots were in sync, hooked up to big screens and they were moving around giving us a music/dance performance of some sort. Watching it, I was scared something was going to go wrong and they were going to bump into each other, but the scale and preciseness of the performance blew me away.
We then proceeded to listen to one of the KUKA workers talk about the industry, what KUKA does, and the companies/customers that use them, especially Tesla and Ford. Obviously a big question is with robotics and automation, where does that leave humans in this company? What happens to their jobs? This was touched on during the visit, and they emphasized that robotics and automation are designed to support workers rather than completely replace them. They highlighted the importance of collaboration between humans and machines, especially through the use of collaborative robots that are designed to work safely alongside humans which was shown in the university.
After the Q&A, we proceeded to our factory tour with our tour guide Wolfgang, who was very passionate and used to teach classes and also worked in the factory, so he had experience everywhere. This was very evident going through our tour, as he did a great job explaining the process into making the robots. The one thing that really surprised me going through the factory was how present humans were in the process, much more than at BMW. They still require human skills that machines cannot fully replicate. Workers are needed to program, monitor, and maintain the robotic systems which Wolfgang did a great job explaining. He also said one thing that was very interesting to me, but also something I totally agree with: he was asked whether he would trust a human or robot more to perform surgery on him and he said robot 100%. I agree with this because there are things that need exact precision that humans sometimes can’t do and robots are much better suited for.
After the tour, we took the tram back to the hotel and had the rest of the day to ourselves. I had my first try at McDonalds overseas for a quick dinner and I’m not going to lie it was a lot better than the U.S. one. The meat tasted much more fresh as well as the nuggets. The only complaint I had was the fries needed a bit more salt. That was it for the day, and time to gear up for one of the most anticipated days of the trip at Neuschwanstein.
