Rivian, the California-based startup that makes the R1S, R1T, and R2 EVs, wants to flood its car factories with robots. In an interview with Kleiner Perkins, RJ Scaringe, the company’s founder and CEO, said that as much as 80% of the assembly line tasks will be automated, and it’s all thanks to the Mind Robotics spinoff established last year.
We don’t know when the robot revolution will hit Rivian’s factory floors, but Scaringe said that things will start off at a smaller scale.
“In the beginning, we’re going to be able to do 20% of the tasks on the plant, but over time, we want to grow that to 80%,” said Scaringe. “And that’s what makes software so exciting and why designing the hardware with headroom is so important.”
To be clear, the vast majority of car plants in the world, including Rivian’s, have some degree of automation. We’ve all seen those huge robot arms that pick up various parts and install them in fixed positions. These robots are manually programmed to do the same task over and over again, and they can only do their job if the parts they need are exactly in the same spot every time.
However, what Rivian—and others like it—aims to do in the future is replace humans who do highly repetitive tasks that have some degree of variability. At first, posts where humans simply pick up a part from a bin and place it on a fixture will be handled by AI-enabled robots that are able to detect small variations in where parts are placed inside the bin.
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