Foxconn has reportedly signed some legal papers to build a huge plant in Taiwan to build intelligent robots and automated systems to incorporate them into their production plants.
FRIDA – A special Robot, with some intelligence built into it, has been in the making for sometime now to replace a lot of young chinese workers across the country. The two-armed robot aims at bridging the gap between human’s manual assembly and an automatic assembly unit.
The robot is controlled by a controller that is attached and integrated with torso. The robot is completely safe for work and can be moved across from one unit to another easily with a little cost. The robot comes from the famous ABB. The company has been installing some units already at various work stations and have been doing really well right now. FRIDA will go large scale now, with Foxconn signing a deal with the company and looking ahead to build a large robot kingdom at Taiwan.
These are the features that ABB promises with the new FRIDA:
Key technology features:
- Harmless robotic coworker for industrial assembly
- Human-like arms and body with integrated IRC5 controller
- Complements human labor with scalable automation
- Padded dual arms ensure safe productivity and flexibility
- Lightweight and easy to mount for fast deployment
- Agile motion based on industry-leading ABB robot technology
What Foxconn is planning now?
Now that FRIDA is stable, as ABB promised, Foxconn has planned to put this robot into action at its assembly plants. Foxconn’s founder and chairman earlier expressed the company’s interest to convert their human workers into robotic workers. The company is also planning to deploy over 300, 000 robots into their assembly units by next year. The largest electronics manufacturer already have 10, 000 of them completely automated and fully functional at some assembly units.
This way, the company has the advantage of completely eradicating the employees suicide at the company. And today, the company has signed some important papers that would allow the company to open a large robot and automation equipments manufacturing plant at Taiwan. According to Focus Taiwan, the company’s parenting company, Hon Hai has signed a letter of intent with Taichung mayor to build an Intelligent robotics kingdom at Central Taiwan Science Park to manufacture over a million robots in the next three years.
FRIDA will be continuously deployed at Foxconn’s various production plants in the next three years with an investment cost of over $4 billion (Overall production and deployment cost). These two-armed robots are expected to do great at the manufacturing plants with highly sophisticated networks that interlinks them and also will let us control them remotely.
All these interesting and real news are making us think like the world is not too far from iRobot kind of lifestyle with personal robots assisting the humans and downloading their firmware updates from a neural hub across the globe. What do you say? Do you think these robots would do some wonderful job compared to humans at the assembly units? Let us know in comments.
[Via Focus Taiwan and Gizmodo]