11,000 robots are ‘born’ every month at the FANUC production facility near Mount Fuji in Japan. To date, it has produced more than 680,000 robots. I discovered these facts and learned a lot more about robots recently at the NEC in Birmingham. This was the venue for the WorldSkills UK Industrial Robotics Competition Live Qualifier stage.
Oliver Selby, Head of Sales for FANUC UK, said 'The WorldSkills UK Industrial Robotics Competition is vital for igniting a passion for automation among young people who might not otherwise get the chance to experience it.' This is the fourth year that the company has supported the competition and year on year the number of entrants increases.
Why the UK Lags Behind in Robotics Adoption
The future success of UK manufacturing depends on increasing the current levels of robot adoption. South Korea tops the league tables and while the number and range of companies in the UK is gradually increasing, it lags behind other countries.
In an article in the Telegraph, Peter Williamson, chief executive of the Processing and Packaging Machinery Association (PPMA), claimed that Britain has historically been more resistant to robots than other countries. 'There’s a real perception in the UK that robots take jobs. And, you know, that’s something that has prevailed since the seventies, when a lot of the car manufacturers in the UK didn’t adopt robotics because they didn’t want to upset or demotivate their workforce. The whole robotic industrial revolution that happened in the seventies and eighties in other parts of the world didn’t happen here.'