I think a lot of people see "automation" as this end-all solution. When in reality it's expensive, unflexible and unstable. Most producing companies don't have good enough preventative maintenance for it to work at all. When you have recurring problems that your own technicians can't solve you're in deep water. It's easy to hire and (unfortunately) fire workers, but a bot you're stuck with.

I see robots/automation as a solution to a problem. That problem is safety. Either repetitive work that slowly breaks down the human, or "this is not good for you"-work that's directly dangerous.

I like that question from the sensei in that goldratt book: "did the robots make you more productive?".

Trying to invest your problems away is a waste of time and money if you don't know, and continously work with your processes. Or what they call kaizen in the article.

Thank you! That’s exactly what a guy from Volkswagen plant told me. They don’t need a 99,9% working robot, because it’s not enough when manufacturing one car each minute. The robot might be cheaper to buy, but they cannot afford to stop the line for such errors.

It is just a matter of time before better, more precise and accurate robots will be created.

Precision is not the biggest issue here. There are very precise robots out there.

The big issue is improvement of standardized work. If you automate early you get tethered by subpar standards. This is natural when you have workers: you iterate work instructions and what tools to use together as a group. This is basically how Toyota is so good at producing: every worker know what to do and when to do it. They haven't always been like this; they have slowly iterated into what they are today.

Improving on work instructions for a robot is tideaus at best, and really, really costly as a worst case: you either re-program, or you're forced to reinvest if the robot isn't capable of the new movements/steps.

Yes, but you still have the problem of bringing this process into your production line and finding out how it makes you more efficient or better.

Musk also had to learn some lessons Toyota learned years ago, because he trusted a bit too much in automation.

If you want to automate something, you need to know exactly all the corner cases, every step of what the human is doing to make it work. The robots are precise enough, but it's often not that easy to describe the tasks to them.

How are these robots programmed? Just a sequence of position movements and affector actions depending on few digital inputs of light curtains or sensors?

In the most simple cases, yes. Parametric programming is popular, where you can define an item and then scale it in a number of factors and only need one program for thousands of possible premutations of that item.

Think about a company that produces screws, they don't have a program for every possible screw they make. Same goes for a more complicated item like a metal box with a door on it.