Another story of the attempt to replace humans with ultra-sophisticated robots, ending in victory for the mammals and defeat for the machines. We’re not at Terminator stage yet.
Why It’s So Difficult for Robots to Make Your Nike Sneakers
shift part of its manufacturing from China,
Indonesia and Vietnam to North America illustrates how tough it is for U.S. brands to wean themselves off the flexible, low-cost contract manufacturers that use armies of laborers to [churn out an array of products] for American consumers.
The shoe giant turned to Flex, an American manufacturer that had helped [Apple] set up a complex factory in Texas to make Mac Pros. The goal: Make tens of millions of Nike sneakers at a new high-tech manufacturing site in Guadalajara, Mexico, by 2023.
Nike and Flex established new production lines that used machines commonly seen in electronics manufacturing—but rarely shoemaking—such as a “pick and place” machine that is known for mounting components onto circuit boards. The machines were supposed to build the upper part of a shoe, knit fabric, add logos and glue the sole.
The effort quickly ran into trouble.
The robots struggled to handle the soft, squishy and stretchy parts that are integral to shoemaking. Shoe fabrics also expand and contract depending on the temperature, while in shoemaking no two soles are exactly alike.
Human workers can adapt to such challenges, but it proved difficult for machines.
Ha. After 8 years they’ve given up. They spent months and months trying to get the macbnines to apply the Nike logo to the stretchy top, and then - the company dropped that model and the machines couldn’t do it on any other model without extensive reprogramming.
That’s what I was looking for, “soft, squishy and stretchy!”
Tesla ran into the same problem with wire harnesses that had to be hand threaded. Their solution was to redesign the processes to use stiff harnesses that industrial robots could handle. That solution is not possible with shoes that need to be pliable but it’s a problem that is easy for humanoid robots with human like hands to deal with.
Note the date, 2018!
Tesla patents new type of cable easier to manipulate by robots in move to automate production
Harder to do with a garment or footwear than it is for an unseen component in a car, though. One can easily design a shoe with materials that can be made by machine (like Crocs, for example). But that doesn’t mean that they’ll be acceptable by consumers as an entry in the market segment you’re working in.
I’m aligned with you. It is common to have backers, bolsters and other tooling to accomodate flexure in tooling. This is also seen in fabrics as the backer layer is used for embroidery. (otherwise called stabilizer, shape flex or poly flex )
p.s. and replying to myself - Don’t mic a brick. Excessive tolerances do nothing but trip up a process which doesn’t require it and cannot tolerate it.
The story mentions that, and it’s a fail. Consumers want more variety than those materials which fall into the “can be made by robots” bucket.
And in fact, it wasn’t just Nike. It was also UnderArmor and Adidas, which also failed in separate attempts.
Flex and Nike wound up the project by early 2019. By then, Under Armour had stopped mentioning to investors its “Project Glory” mission to make shoes in the U.S. That year Adidas, which had also faced challenges producing complex shoes with robots, said it would close down production in Atlanta and Germany. It shipped its “speedfactory” technology to suppliers in Asia.
The three shoemakers stuck with their original offshore locations—Vietnam, China, and Indonesia—even after pandemic-era factory shutdowns showed the risk of having such a [concentrated node of production].
Humans, 9th inning rally, win again. Maybe not next time, but this year, still champs.
