[HN Gopher] What Are 'Dark Factories,' and Do They Exist?
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What Are 'Dark Factories,' and Do They Exist?
Author : Ariarule
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-01-28 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.grainger.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.grainger.com)
| bottlepalm wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
| nickdothutton wrote:
| One of the things Minority Report got right, was the chase scene
| in the factory.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| > ... There are certainly shades of gray in this concept.
|
| Not quite dark - wouldn't there be a red room then?
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Its usually called a lights out factory - and they some Japanese
| production facilities claim to run in this mode. Fanuc and Sony-
| Playstation comes to mind.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ-YkFzWj6o
|
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-sec...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
|
| My personal experience with robots and factory automation makes
| these claims rather dubious. There is always some stressed
| maintainer needed, at lest on standby. Factory equipment ages
| constantly and even "durable" parts, like the energy chains break
| regularly irregularly and it takes experience to detect and pre-
| emptively replace these. Until that "flickering" part is
| replaced, you have a constant series of increasingly occurring
| line stops. Including, product removal and NIO product
| increasing. Its possible to run a busy looking factory producing
| nothing but scrap for days.
|
| Broken products and its residue clog at unexpected places, a
| thousand parts later, the glue from the packaging it arrives in,
| makes the unwrapping machine sticky. Dust that comes in with the
| package, accumulates or static charges transport actually non
| floating foils to unexpected places.
|
| Nature finds a way, and spiders build there webs in front of
| light or capacity sensors. Even cats bring there young into some
| hidden cable spaces and thats a good thing, because they prevent
| rats from gnawing on the cables.
|
| Finally, the cheapest bidder wins and makes factory equipment
| everywhere, especially if its new, prone to breakage and failure.
| Resulting in the maintainers, partially rebuilding machines with
| self-made parts until they are sturdy. Until that stage is
| reached, machines can have quirks, like vibrations moving sensors
| of position.
|
| Also, the cheapest supplier also comes to plc software, resulting
| in horrific state-machines, waiting for ghost parts that left the
| system aeons ago and need careful massaging by maintainers to
| calm the enraged machine spirits (sometimes by hitting a robot
| with a wrench-> It opens the safety circuit, resetting the
| programs base state).
|
| Many robots are needed for very precise tasks, and need to re-
| calibrate in intervals to keep fulfilling there tasks. These
| error calibrations happen on top of the often used Non-parametric
| robot calibration
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_calibration.
|
| Its prone to move with temperature, moisture and alot of other
| parameters. Requiring a adaption of the programs used in
| industrial automation.
|
| Finally, there are "sales-failures", were the automation is sold,
| produced and then - never worked out. As in a dead "abandoned
| channel" of the assembly line. Its shown during factory tours as
| the "future" but the layer of dust and the missing traces of use
| give away, that it is not used in production. Usually its
| precision requirements that couldnt be met or would have required
| insane efforts. The Welding at Wendelstein comes to mind, were
| they created a "reference frame via laser triangulation" to
| prevent wrong welds, due to heat expansion of the material. Same
| insanity is usually applied to car manufacturing in germany,
| especially for the
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaltma%C3%9F obsessions, which
| regularly result in insane bake offs, with all kinds of robots,
| sensors and suppliers. That sort of machine just throws alarms,
| just from heavy equipment working nearby. No lights out there.
|
| Ever.
|
| Some guy sitting nearby, hitting the acknowledge and retry button
| after viewing up from the cellphone. So anal retentive quality
| control is a direct opponent of lights out, they want lights on
| all the time and fast detection of creeping in errors.
|
| So, its a nice goal, but until machines can handle all of the
| above. No.
| bredren wrote:
| >Even cats bring there young into some hidden cable spaces and
| thats a good thing, because they prevent rats from gnawing on
| the cables.
|
| I like this detail.
| alcover wrote:
| Thank you for providing this grounded view. Writing software,
| the moving parts seem to work almost perfectly except the rare
| bit-flip. But it seems factory-scale robotics are not like
| that..
| 2ICofafireteam wrote:
| There is a halfway kind we called the lights out shift in a
| factory where I worked that only ran a day shift.
|
| A couple of turning centres with bar feeders that were left
| running when we went home would run until a fault occurred or the
| parts hopper filled up.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Ten years ago I was at a Phillip Morris cigarette factory for a
| two-week IT consulting project. The entire factory was off-limits
| to staff during operation.
|
| Ingredients went in one side, cartons of cigarettes came out the
| other.
| arbuge wrote:
| One might note here that not all robots are created equal. Robots
| dependent on machine vision to function would need a lighted
| factory similarly to humans.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| You also can't let the temperature drop too low or the
| lubrication for all the gears and servos will solidify. Even
| robots have running temperature requirements. In colder areas,
| you have heated storage because lots of electronics don't like
| being stored in freezing conditions.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Light is only needed in a smart area of the machine vision
| system not a whole factory
| dwighttk wrote:
| Also climate control will be needed to some extent...
| derefr wrote:
| ...but not necessarily the _same_ climate. Depending on the
| robot, they could have a higher MBTF if the thermostat were
| set at 0C, or 50C.
|
| And more interestingly, there might be value in isolated
| sections of the factory being climate-controlled to very
| _different_ temperatures, depending on the particular robot
| in use. Not like these things walk around between stations.
| a2tech wrote:
| CNC adoption is actually driving improvements to the
| physical plants I work with--the machines can't run with it
| as hot as people can so they're starting to actually put in
| AC. Oh that and the old guys that work in those machine
| shops can't deal with the high temps like they used to so
| management is afraid they're going to pass out and fall
| into the machines...
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Most 'visual servoing' systems need edges or contours but not
| colour.
|
| In the long run it would still probably be cheaper to have
| infrared cameras or a few LED rings around the camera lense
| rather than full on industrial grade lighting 365 days in the
| year.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| The way this looks like now (in the United States additive
| manufacturing industry) is that people, Zapier, and bits of
| scripting glue form the automation layer in most shops. This is
| really important, because labor costs _so much_ more in the US
| compared to other manufacturing centers.
|
| Companies that have attempted to achieve 100% automation (like
| YC-backed Voodoo Manufacturing) have gone out of business,
| because you still need people to run floor operations, do sales,
| handle customer accounts. What's important is to give a few
| generalists no-code tools, so a machine technician can quickly
| iterate on a model without sending it back to a CAD designer.
|
| Here's one of my favorite examples of a 3D printing operation in
| the United States, if you're curious what these businesses look
| like. Kason Knight started iSolids with a 3D printer in a spare
| linen closet. He's now running a ~10 person operation out of a
| warehouse in Texas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPcA9uIgi7g
|
| Edited: typo
| px43 wrote:
| I've been waiting for one of those factory simulator games to
| have something where when you pass some certain level in the
| game, it goes into Enders Game mode, and players start
| controlling machines in real factories. Users could even get paid
| to do this, and to scale up their operation with automation tools
| etc.
|
| Same with farming simulators, mining simulators, fast food
| simulators, etc.
| buzer wrote:
| Careful with what all things will be hooked up into that.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y729vwvauWE
| roomey wrote:
| Neil Stephenson predicting the future yet again with reamde
| (sic).
|
| The plot is a world of warcraft style MMORPG is linked to real
| world settings (such as airport security) to allow people
| playing the game to preform real life actions (in the book, the
| example was sound an alarm when they spotted a character
| travelling the wrong direction). The idea being, if it is a
| game (or simulator as you say) you can make it waaayyyy more
| interesting than the real life work.
|
| Between him and Daniel Suarez these "near future" sci fi
| writers are getting scary good at predicting some things.
|
| Any other authors are books would be much appreciated!
| ConradKilroy wrote:
| @px43, </Brilliant Black Mirror Plot Twist>
| narrator wrote:
| There was the guy who won the NASCAR race using the trick he
| learned on the GameCube NASCAR game. The trick was to make the
| last turn skidding against the outer wall with the car floored
| and pass everyone.
|
| Enders game is probably obsolete since AlphaGo zero can play
| better than any human. Just have the AI reinforcement learn
| over the course of a trillion games in the simulator.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Do it with car simulators, and you have the Mechanical Turk
| backend for Full Self Driving.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Then some four-year-old gets their hands on it when Dad goes
| to get a glass of water, and...
| prettyStandard wrote:
| How is this much different than keeping your car keys away
| from the kids now?
|
| I get what you are saying, there is a risk to be
| acknowledged and protected against. I'm just saying it's
| different, but already there.
| schoen wrote:
| In the Ender's Game scenario, you're intentionally not
| told about the associated risks.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Context separation.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > How is this much different than keeping your car keys
| away from the kids now?
|
| That neither you or your kids are at risk, only some
| loser dumb enough to trust the Turker Self-Driving app.
| kortilla wrote:
| The dad thinks it's a simulator...
| mindslight wrote:
| ... sound a perfunctory chime and blame the person sitting
| in the left front seat.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| ...and we have another of the self-driving incidents we've
| all come to know.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| Or this could happen...
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=4c6kaAJj7ik
| cammikebrown wrote:
| There are crane game apps with cameras pointed at real cranes
| so you can control a real crane live and win real prizes. I've
| never even gotten close to winning, though.
| tersers wrote:
| This does seem like an inevitability. It will likely stamp out a
| lot of black market, after-hours manufacturing.
| Ccecil wrote:
| "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man
| and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be
| there to keep the man from touching the equipment"
| HPsquared wrote:
| Or, all the actual work done by one person like in Futurama,
| "My Hermes got that hellhole running so efficiently that all
| the physical labor is now done by a single Australian man"
| moomin wrote:
| You take this concept far enough and factories become like
| corporate bonds. Put money in, money comes out. The question
| ultimately becomes: if no-one's labour is needed, do we need to
| retain money?
| WJW wrote:
| Not all labour is performed in factories, so... yes? It's
| hardly be feasible to have "dark hospital" for example. Even if
| the robotic doctors would be fine without light, the patients
| would be a lot happier if they can see.
| shevis wrote:
| Lol at the idea that automatic factories means no-one's labour
| is needed. Not all labour is factory labour nor can it be
| converted to factory labour.
| bitwize wrote:
| I was gonna say, at any given facility you'd need at least a man
| and a dog: the man to feed the dog, and the dog to make sure the
| man doesn't touch anything.
| jahnu wrote:
| Obligatory Granddaddy reference:
|
| "Supervisor guy turns off the factory lights
|
| So the robots have to work in the dark"
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Ur6aV5Dc8
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(page generated 2023-01-28 23:00 UTC)