FOUR years ago, Foxconn founder Terry Gou envisaged an army of 1-million robots would now be working the assembly lines at the world’s biggest contract electronics maker.Today the Taiwanese assembler of iPhones and iPads has about 50,000 automated employees and still has more than 1-million humans in its chain of Chinese factories.The deficit underscored the challenges Foxconn faced in fine-tuning its robots — a catch-all term that includes robotic arms and other automated equipment — to handle the intricate tasks required to assemble modern gear and gadgets, said Day Chia-Peng, the general manager of the company’s automation technology development committee.Foxconn, which calls its industrial robots Foxbots, has been striving to accelerate manufacturing automation amid rising labour costs and workplace disputes, and to free humans of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. But high development costs and rapid changes in technology have slowed progress.While the company had automated ...
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