World's First Employment Agency for Robots

(Adapted from https://www.hrtechnation.com)

MusashiAI, a joint venture between SixAI Ltd. of Israel and Musashi Seimitsu of Japan (a Honda Motor Corporation affiliate company), has launched its fully autonomous robots to integrate seamlessly with human workers in an Industry 4.0 factory environment. The advanced robots are planned to undertake the often overly strenuous and repetitive work endured by humans in the manufacturing workplaces.

The JV also introduces a unique business model by providing industries with the option to source the labor they need through a robotic employment agency instead of investing significant capital purchasing robots as machines. This novel model allows companies to hire robot labor by the hour or literally pay on a task-completed-based salary rate.

This represents a major leap forward in the introduction of automation technologies into more industries:

• The robots are autonomous rather than automated — they are given tasks and define their own optimal way to perform those tasks, just as humans do.
• The robot models offered take on tasks that humans find overly repetitive, strenuous, and unfulfilling.
• The new Robot as a Service (RaaS) model enables companies to hire robots by the hour or task, which helps support many more companies or organizations.

According to Ran Poliakine, Founder & Chairman of SixAI: “Our goal is to find ways to integrate genuinely smart robots in real-world workplaces. We want people and companies to be able to allocate repetitive but essential work to robot workers, while humans focus on more complex and engaging tasks, where they have a competitive advantage over machines. Our collaboration with Musashi Semitsu comes to unveil our advanced AI, optics and edge computing capabilities to optimize industrial performance and present real Industry 4.0 solutions.”

The business model is a game changer. MasushiAI will provide additional capability in markets that struggle with labor availability either because of the difficulty of the work or due to the cost pressures they face. By offering hourly or task-based salary rates, the autonomous robotic AI employees are easy to plan for and integrate in any factory workflow. This brings the costs to about one third or half of the annual cost of a human performing these jobs.

Musashi Seimitsu is currently testing two types of robots:

• Visual Quality Control Inspector. Based on artificial intelligence and cutting-edge optics, the visual inspector is able, just like the human employee, to identify defects in manufacturing lines.
• Fully Autonomous Forklift Driver. The robot navigates on its own to perform a variety of logistics tasks previously limited to human forklift drivers, with unparalleled efficiency and safety standards aimed at preventing injuries to staff on the warehouse or manufacturing floor.

By way of example, an experienced human quality control inspector checks manufactured parts for defects in approximately 2 seconds per part with an accuracy of 97%. Traditionally, the better robots took over 20 seconds per component to achieve 70% accuracy. MusashiAI’s AI-based robots already work at a similar effectiveness to humans with just under 2 seconds for above 98% accuracy. Real AI, namely self-taught machine learning, is central to this achievement.

Maestro@634.ai