The boon and bane of new age technologies are driving both innovative and fearful aspects of automated facilities. The automated facilities, especially in the manufacturing sector, is equipped with physical barriers, guarding and fences.

The automated industrial robots have the capability of moving fast and perform tasks which are beyond imagination as well. Therefore, these guards work as a legitimate fence. But on the other hand, the cleverness of human paves their way to find workarounds for physical constraints which can be dangerous at times.

The experts look forward to the day when human and machines can work collaboratively by the virtue of vision technology and artificial intelligence, without any fencing and fear.

A Massachusetts-based company Veo Robotics has been working to create a collaborative robot (in other words Cobot) system operating on speed and separation monitoring gained reliably employing AI and advanced vision. The current cobots are based on force and speed limitations.

Reportedly, the Freemove system of the company can make any robot collaborative and program the ability to operate close to a person in that environment.

This remarkable work compels others to think and recognize the rising need for collaborative automation which current cobots lack.

The essence of collaborative automation describes that this approach gives the opportunity to include a human in the overall cycle which is contradictory to full automation concept. Well, the recent observations depicted that collaborative automation is more valuable than full automation because a number of manufacturing trends are finding the latter technology as problematic. These problems may include mass customization, short product cycles, and strict quality demands.

Industry experts too, believe that collaborative automation makes economic sense as it is partial and can co-exist with human beings.

Well, now the question arises – How the AI system is better than a physical fence?

The physical fences are vulnerable to human intelligence. Humans follow the conflicting motives that land them in danger. For instance, there can be certain situations during the manufacturing process between procedure and production which can be conflicting. In that situation, the worker can tend to compromise one aspect to save another that might end up being deadly for him. But in the case of vision and AI, this cannot happen. There is no way staff can defeat tech-powered system because the responses are majorly directed by technology only. The vision and AI system don't provide any fence that could be jumped.

In the prevailing cobot system, there are certain non-contact systems following which robots are kept away from certain objects. This increase the barrier and fencing in their reach. Such situations definitely don't seem like a collaborative environment where human and robots can easily work together. Also, the more is the close proximity of both working together the lesser will be the burden on automation to achieve every detail of pieces of stuff.

With this collaborative approach of vision and AI, the experts hope for a workplace in which any automated industrial machine might be supervised by a system and produce floors without guards and barriers through which people can move freely and without any fear.