GETTING THE WORD OUT

TECHNOLOGY
ONE PER CENT
Fieldnotes Factory 2050
Wait,I’llreconfigure
Jacob Aron crosses the frontier into the factory of the future
BOND BRYAN
PLANES, trains, automobiles? Not
quite yet: Factory 2050 in Sheffield,
UK, isn’t building anything you can buy.
Instead, the brains behind the project
are rethinking the manufacturing
process itself, aiming to change how
we make everything from airplanes to
nuclear power plants.
Inside the factory, things are looking
a little unfinished. It opened in January,
and the team from the University of
Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing
Research Centre (AMRC) are still
moving in. The place is sparkling clean,
and smells like a newly furnished IKEA,
but it’s gearing up to change the way
whole industries work by applying
virtual reality, robotics and bitcoin’s
blockchain.
A gaggle of orange robot arms
catches my eye. Built by German firm
KUKA for car manufacturing, these
bots are sloppy when it comes to
aerospace. Making planes is so
complex that they need to be
assembled with 20 times more
accuracy than these arms can handle.
Steve Bowles, an engineer on the
project, is working to fix this. Laser
tracking can ensure the robots deposit
an exact amount of adhesive between
two parts of a wing, for instance.
Too much or too little could lead to a
catastrophic failure when the plane
takes off.
Past the orange arms is the KUKA
omniMove, a robot the size of a small,
squashed car. Instead of tyres, each of
its eight wheels is covered in diagonal
rollers that let the bot move in any
direction without turning. UK
construction firm Laing O’Rourke has
tasked AMRC with using the
omniMove to study the pouring and
moving of concrete floors. The plan is
for the robots to churn out modular
parts for buildings and assemble them
on location.
AMRC foresees a future in which
robots take on the drudgery of
–Give me a minute, I’m tooling up–
manufacturing, leaving humans to
plan and formulate strategies for
guiding the machines. “You can have
the humans concentrating on
processes that require dexterous
thoughts and hands,” says Bowles.
“The idea is to assist the worker.”
This automated factory will
generate huge volumes of data.
By linking together all the cameras,
lasers and other sensors the team can
create a digital twin of the building
“The factory will physically
rearrange itself to create
thebestproductionline
for the job”
that will monitor every manufacturing
process and perhaps individual
components. This will help AMRC
retool on the fly, digitally swapping out
parts of the production line to model
changes in the hunt for efficiency.
Once an automated system has
determined the best set of tools,
the factory can physically rearrange
itself to create the best production
line for the job.
AMRC has also recently become
interested in the blockchain, the
unfalsifiable ledger technology
behind the bitcoin virtual currency.
It would track and certify the path
of raw materials all the way to the
finished product, ensuring provenance
and quality. “At every interaction,
you would capture data around a
given material or component,”
says AMRC chief technical officer
Sam Turner.
Factory 2050 feels like a toy shop,
but the researchers aren’t just
tinkering. The goal is to get the ideas
straight into industrial use, rather than
letting them languish in the lab. “We’re
looking at how to make manufacturing
processes more efficient, more safe
and more reliable,” says Bowles. ■
Robot ripper
Last week, Apple unveiled Liam,
a robot built to rip apart old phones
and pull out anything that can be
recycled. Made up of 29 robotic
arms, Liam starts by pulling off the
screen, before moving on to the
guts – battery, processor and even
screws. At full clip, it takes apart a
phone every 11 seconds. There is
currently only one Liam, in
California, but Apple is building
another in Europe.
“So fricken excited
to meet you … like
humans seem so
awesome”
Tay greets the world (23 March).
Within hours, the Microsoft chatbot
had been tricked into spewing racist
comments on Twitter
Global face-off
How many people look just like
you? FaceTopo’s software could let
you find out by comparing your
face with thousands of others
around the world. After uploading
a series of selfies, an app identifies
key facial features and uses them
to find lookalikes from around the
world, or show you how similar
your face is to those of family
members in previous generations.
Once FaceTopo has collected
enough data, its developers hope
to study the degree of variation
across all human faces.
APPLE
20 | NewScientist | 2 April 2016