

3-D Printing, robotics swing manufacturing might from China back to the U.S.  - blurpin
http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/23/the-end-of-chinese-manufacturing-and-rebirth-of-u-s-industry/

======
ChuckMcM
[ Disclaimer, I bought a 'Replicator' [1] from Makerbot so its the only one
I've got 'first hand' knowledge ]

The 'hobby' ones are still very rough. Think Altair/IMSAI level of personal
computer. The lack of a reasonable filler/support material (so that you can
print 'voids' and later dissolve out the filler) means that a lot of obviously
useful shapes are unprintable at the moment (horizontal tubes for example).
But the writing is, as they say, on the wall. My instinct is that plastic
printing will overtake injection molding for small run products in as few as
10 years.

The biggest challenge to robotics in the US market has been organized
resistance. Ford had the most productive auto plant in the world, in Brazil,
because it was mostly robotic. They tried, and failed, to get it built in the
US. But the depth and length of this recession has changed the politics on
that to the point where 'any' jobs trumps 'no' jobs, even if the 'any' comes
with the uncomfortable reality that nobody in the new plant will be able to
work without at least a solid high school diploma and 2 years of apprenticing.
The 'high paying' jobs will require a four year degree in manufacturing
technology.

[1] <http://www.makerbot.com/docs/replicator/>

~~~
TylerE
I don't think 3D printing is going to replace injection molding any time soon,
even for relatively small runs. The cycle time is just so much longer - an
injection molding machine can make most parts, even quite large ones (think
big plastic trashcans) in on the order of less than a minute, sometimes much
less depending on the machine. That's also ignoring that the plastics you can
injection mold have better mechanical properties and surface finishes, too.

Of course, true small run stuff isn't usually injection molded anyway, due to
the amount of time and effort and high grade tool steel it takes to make the
mold.

Where 3D printing really IS changing things is prototyping and the occasional
one-off part, but we're quite far off production usage.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ok I gave it 10 years as a minimum, is that soon? That number came from the
transition in DIY computers to computers for business which I put between 1978
(all hobby) to 1988 where we've got the Mac, the PC, and some lesser known
brands (Amiga and Atari) replacing the 'big iron' in companies for some tasks.

As with computers, if a 3D printer is cheap enough you can run 200 in parallel
to get production rates into the 'few thousand widgets per day' Today the
surface finish and the materials are not up there (but a 2K byte Altair 8800
wasn't really a contender to do desktop publishing either :-)

The thing you have to be careful of is this: _"That's also ignoring that the
plastics you can injection mold have better mechanical properties and surface
finishes, too."_ because that thinking will bite you back. It just has to be
'good enough' and cheaper and it puts those characteristics into the 'nice to
have' category. I agree that there will probably always be a market for some
injection molding but I can see that it will be the 'specialized' stuff and
not the 'general' stuff. Just a matter of time.

~~~
TylerE
Commercial injection modeling is going to be at the rate of perhaps a thousand
per hour, not per shift. Many parts will be set up so that a single "hit" of
the mold can produce dozens of parts.

In manufacturing, processes are used that have a minimum number of steps.
Cycle time is critical. Even CNC doesn't have that much penetration outside of
a very few select industries, namely aerospace and some automotive. Very
little, if anything, on a consumer product will be CNC made, for much the same
reasons 3D printing will have a very hard time catching on for production.

One real niche for CNC is actually making molds for injection molding - that's
one case where taking dozens of hours to cut a single part isn't a problem, as
that one mold can stamp hundreds of thousands of parts.

Source: I'm actually a manufacturing engineer by training.

EDIT: And yes, I think 10 years is much too soon. Industry has a huge amount
of money invested in existing factories. Much of that equipment is useable for
decades to come. You would have to get quite a bit better than the existing
standard for them to even think about replacing the existing lines.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Awesome, I disagree of course but its a great discussion. My experience is
with the integration of low cost compute into the flows rather than
manufacturing. However I find it striking how similar your argument sounds to
the ones that IBM made early on about how PCs would 'never' threaten
mainframes because they didn't have the IO capabilities or the printing
capability. And while certain markets still use them (credit card processing
for example), a lot of things they were used for succumbed to a new way of
doing things because it was cheap.

I suspect that much of the challenge with CNC penetration is with the costs
involved. But could easily be wrong.

Current injection molding _does_ make thousands per hour and that's certainly
achievable with thousands of 3D printers running in parallel, but the place
where I think you will first see disruption will be in the 'short run'
segments, where people would make 100,000 parts (minimum run) and only sell
10,000 units. Their price per unit was effectively 10x in that case. But they
have no other way to get to 10,000 at the moment. In the compute space that is
how the market disrupted, lower performance of the unit offset by the savings
of not having to over provision for the compute capacity. Will be interesting
to watch.

------
mcantelon
>Google recently announced that its Nexus Q streaming media player would be
made in the U.S., and this put pressure on Apple to start following suit.

So Tim Cook announces Apple's intention to do this at the end of May, and this
is somehow "following suit" when Google hadn't even announced the Nexus Q yet
(June 27)?

>We can only guess. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass says that just as we have created
new, higher-paying jobs in every other industrial transition, we will create a
new set of industries and professions in this one.

What are _average_ humans capable of that robots aren't?

~~~
Qworg
Average humans are capable of fine manipulation and fast visual recognition at
low prices.

~~~
nnnnni
Robots are capable of ridiculously fast visual recognition for considerably
longer stretches of time than humans.

~~~
malandrew
True, but I think Qworg was instead suggesting that humans are good where the
confidence/accuracy of robots drops off. Machine learning tasks usually get to
70% good enough pretty quickly, but after that each percent gain costs more
and more. There's a point where humans can complement robots when the robots
are not yet good enough to solve the problem.

------
consultutah
I've been saying this for a while. I think all manufacturing will turn local
at some point, though it may take decades still. If I ran FedEx/Kinkos, I'd be
researching all the best 3D printers and trying to pick winners and losers.

~~~
terryk88a
A while back (seems like it's been about a year) Radio Shack solicited ideas
to make their stores more relevant. I suggested they install 3d printers in
every store to bring hobbyists back in.

Crickets.

------
Symmetry
The US already has plenty of manufacturing, we make more stuff in the US right
now than we ever have in the past. The thing is that we just use robots
instead of people to do most of it - and 3D printing will only tend to
continue this trend.

------
warrenmiller
Surely if the robots are replacing people then they're not really creating
jobs, just taking jobs away from the Chinese. Sure there will be some people
manning the robots, but isn't the whole point of using robots to cut down on
the human workforce?

Even the robots aren't created in USA - some are Kuka robots from Germany.

~~~
shimon_e
Many simple products are made completely by machine yet have been coming for a
long time from places like China. Sometimes it is due to the Chinese owning
better machines (e.g. mills in China are generally more advance than their
counterparts in America).

3D printers are probably going to be a boost for Mexico and low cost countries
in Europe. That is if they get their act together.

------
qntmfred
I've seen a lot from the DIY companies and academic demos - what companies are
designing this kind of production-quality cutting edge robotics and AI
solutions though? I'd like to be a part of this future, but it seems like
those jobs are in much shorter supply and harder to find.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I would say the jobs in 'cutting edge' robotics (no pun intended) are in
surgical robots. Intuitive Surgical is growing very quickly. Proto-typing is
at companies like Zmachines.

You need to realize that the personal computer market was all DIY and academic
demos until Lotus 123 on the Apple came out. That filled a niche in business.
When the PC came out it was supported by a 'real' company (Apple was not
considered much of a company then). I would expect a similar trend in 3D
printing. Some niche will open up and cause a lot of 'enterprise' money to be
spent there and then one of the printer companies will jump in with the kind
of product these things will evolve into. (And you'll get to complain to your
grandkids about all the beige 3D printers are so boring, you remember when
they were innovative and quirky)

Much of the AI stuff has been in pick and place robots (see the Japanese
competition on this) and the military's use.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
The DIY aspect is a very good point. I just finished watching a few videos on
YouTube on early machine tools and one of the narrators mentioned that a lot
of early milling machines didn't even have manufacturer's names because they
were built in-house by the same people who needed them.

There is a very large DIY contingent building CNC machines of all flavors, not
just the basic lathes and mills, but routers, benders, presses, wireforming
tools, etc. Take a look around cnczone.com; you can waste hours on that site.

The DIY part of the industry needs software. The dominant tools are still very
basic and there doesn't seem to be much support for 4 and 5-axis machining
because most DIYers are only building 3-axis machines at most. So there may
not be a huge number of jobs, but there is room to make your mark writing
software for the home-built project machines.

I'm awaiting the day someone posts their design for a 5-axis homebuilt mill
fully integrated with their own CAM software. I think that person will become
very rich.

------
cadr
I seem to remember hearing some argument about why it is hard to bring
manufacturing back to the US, and it had to do with the supply chain in China
being vastly shorter. I'm not sure how robotics would address that. Thoughts?

------
terryk88a
For those who aren't well read (grin) a very good read looking at a dystopian
future where 3d printers have displaced manufacturing is Cory Doctorow's
"Makers". The Creative Commons licensed book can be downloaded from his
website, craphound.com, or purchased elsewhere.

I suspect it may be one of those near-prophetic works of science fiction that
will amaze future generations - "How'd he see that coming?"

------
senthilnayagam
the kind of jobs that would be created would be to install and maintain these
robots and machines, until someone figures a way to automate that as well

~~~
DanI-S
But with any luck, the products of fully automated local manufacturing will be
so much cheaper that humans won't need to work long hours in monotonous jobs
in order to buy them.

~~~
glesica
I love the sentiment, but I doubt it will come to pass. That's exactly what
people have said at every stage of industrialization. But the gains always end
up being consolidated and the long work weeks and boring jobs march on.

~~~
learc83
>the long work weeks and boring jobs march on.

The long work weeks continue because apparently we are willing to trade less
time at work for more stuff. If you want to live a 1960s lifestyle with a 60s
size house, 60s level health care, 1 car per family, only 60s era gadgets, and
cooking the vast majority of your meals--you could easily do it on 20 hours a
week for most jobs.

As an experiment to illustrate my point, look around the room you're in and
count the things that you own that didn't exist in 1960.

------
micro_cam
Does anyone know of any US based consumer electronics factories set up to take
small-medium sized orders from small companies...say for kickstart campaign
funded products like the Ouya?

~~~
derda
One problem for consumer goods production in europe / US is component
sourcing. You will need a PCB-Fab, ICs, injection molding, ... . While you can
get most (some things just arent built statesside anymore) of those things in
the states, they will be more expensive and maybe not built to capacity (since
they specialized on really small batches for example). In china you will have
all of the suppliers down the road and pretty cheap.

From someone who worked for a large automotive supplier, which does a lot of
manufacturing here in germany, that wanted to release a consumer device I
heard that you can get the whole product finished in china for the price of
sourcing the components in europe.

------
jfoutz
This article is great opportunity for the title editor.

