MASTERS OF MANUFACTURING: Joseph F. Engelberger

Manufacturing Engineering, Jul 2006 by Waurzyniak, Patrick

ME: You visited Japan in 1966?

Engelberger: Yeah, and it was something. At the time in the United States, I had trouble getting 6-10 people to listen to me about what I wanted to do, but when I got to Japan, they had a conference with 400 executives wanting to hear about robotics. I've been to Japan 38 times since.

ME: Why were the Japanese fascinated with robotics?

Engelberger: A lot of things. First of all, there was RoboBoy in their television, it had been on for a long time. They had no unemployment. They did not like guest workers. They didn't want to bring foreign help in, so the robot comes along and they saw it as a way to improve their manufacturing skills. The Japanese formed the Japan Robot Association three years before we had one in the United States, and they got the president of Mitsubishi to be the first president. We begged General Motors, we begged everyone to give us the first guy to be the president, but we couldn't get them interested here in this country.

ME: Why were US manufacturers slow to adopt robots in factories? Weren't the early Japanese efforts mostly non-programmable machines performing automated tasks?

Engelberger: That's automation. At the outset in the United States, I suggested that we make robots a subset of automation. That to me was OK. Don't emphasize this walking, talking doll and all those things. It's a subset of automation, programmable automation, but our guys wouldn't have any part of it. No, the Robotic Industries Association when it was getting started said 'We want to be something separate.' It was a subsidiary, at the time, by the way, of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, which supported the Robotic Industries Association when they didn't have any funds of their own. This was in the early 1960s.

ME: Were you surprised at this kind of reluctance by the US manufacturing giants?

Engelberger: Yeah, look at the fact that they were so scared of labor, that there's going to be people writing articles all over 'The robot's going to take all the jobs away.' Not so, the robot had a big advantage, it enters the workforce gently. You don't displace mobs of people all at once with robots. Now if you automate, sometimes everyone goes-it's full automation then. And when I talked to the labor unions, the guys who run labor unions were not dummies. They said, 'Look, we're not against robots. We think the jobs they do are miserable jobs anyway, and our workers shouldn't do them. We don't want you to displace our labor en masse. If they displace them slowly, it's acceptable.' The way it works, the robots go in gently, they do not result in masses of people going out at once.

ME: What were some early difficulties making robots?

Engelberger: When we started, from a reliability point of view, we had a 400-hr mean-time-before-failure. I used to tell customers, 'You know what, that's about the same as a human employee-he goes down once in 300-400 hours.' We got away with it, and we had good service. I said, 'Here's the thing you've got to realize is that, if something happens at the end of the second shift, we'll get to you and fix it before the beginning of the first shift. If something happens at the beginning of the first shift, you're going to lose that shift.' That's where I came up with 400-hr MTBF, and the amount of downtime.