[IREX 2011] Your Co-Worker may be a Robot Soon

 One of the coolest demos at IREX was the humanoid industrial robot NEXTAGE by Kawada Industries.  NEXTAGE, which made its debut during IREX two years ago, was designed specifically to work side by side with humans in the assembly line. Since then, about 10 Japanese companies have already implemented this robot in their manufacturing facilities, according to Takakatsu Isozumi, General Manager of the Mechatronics Systems Division at Kawada.  So for workers at these companies, the future is already here.

Two of these companies have made public that they are indeed using NEXTAGE to manufacture their products. One is Hitachi, which implemented NEXTAGE into its hard disk manufacturing line. The other is Glory, where NEXTAGE is busy assembling modules for ATM machines. NEXTAGE takes responsibility for repetitive tasks while humans focus on work that need frequent adjustments. 

The video below taken by science writer Kazumichi Moriyama shows NEXTAGE showing off at IREX many of its skills that it learned in the past two years, answering to the various requests from real customers. The fact that NEXTAGE is a real product being used in real life made it stand out from the other humanoids at IREX which are still in the research phase. The basic model of NEXTAGE costs about 7.5 million yen and typically it will cost around 10 to 12 million yen per unit with customized software and peripherals.  

One of the keywords in humanoid robotics these days is Co-X: Developing robots to become Co-Workers, Co-Inhabitants, Co-Defenders, etc. NEXTAGE is one of the first products that realizes this goal.

So far, Kawada is focusing on the Japanese market, but eventually they are planning to sell NEXTAGE abroad too.

Isozumi-san and NEXTAGE - shoulder to shoulder.

Comments

[Erich]

I guess the keyword here is coexistence: We will learn to live around robots