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Comment by reportingsjr | Hacker News Reader

>"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly.

Go find me a reasonably profitable machine shop that doesn't have mostly CNC machines. You won't find many. Even in places with low cost labor like China CNC machines are pretty ubiquitous outside of fairly specialty shops.

You can look on YouTube and see tons of examples of factories that have a mixture of robotic automation and human labor. The production world has changed a ton in the last ten to fifteen years!

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CNC machines add capabilities that are not possible by hand. In these shops, you might see deburring done as an extension of the machine cycle where labor cost is high, but by hand where it is low.

GP is right that automation is a huge commitment in design and manufacture. If there are any finicky parts, it's likely that humans will have to do or correct the robot's job, and now you have an idle robot and an engaged human.

For metal fabrication, yes. CNC mills do make quite a lot of commercial sense for even low volume fabrications. But we here talk about electronics manufacturing, not metalworking.

I mean, even in electronics manufacturing the level of automation and robotics has drastically increased. Pick and place machines for the low end are cheap and ubiquitous these days. Go look up videos of battery factories and look at the level of robotics they have involved. It's incredible!

Automatic board population has been the case for decades, yet electronics factories are for larger part non-automated past that.

Batteries are too a very easy to understand case for automation. You have to make a single widget without alterations by billions for year on end — exactly the case for maximum automation.

That's a little unfair. CNC are a type of machine that do something every machine shop would need to do. Manufacturing and assembly typically require very specific automation that would be useless to anything else...hence why it only makes sense with volume.

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