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BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

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Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#161

Post by frigg »

amai wrote: post #154

Now they can produce even more cars nobody wants. BMW really needs to change its strategy to build cars for the future ( battery electric vehicles ) and stop churning out all those heavy diesel SUVs. Because it doesn't matter how efficient you produce something, if it is the wrong thing you produce. Actually producing the wrong product highly efficiently makes matters even worse. It's like running in the wrong direct…

>battery electric vehicles >if it is the wrong thing you produce

Says you and not the guys with the big pockets that actually do market research? Until you solve the charging times problem, the mileage problem and the amount of available charging stations problem you will not see wide adoption. Most people don't want them and petrol is still king for many years to come.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#162

Post by RGamma »

jimnotgym wrote: post #107
hypeatei wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and it's quite resilient to digital outages/downtime (at least in terms of hours, probably not more than a few days) so your manufacturing productivity won't drop to zero when the ERP system goes down. The paper logs can also be entered later when the system comes back up. As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.

I remember a few years ago hearing that SAP stood for Stop All Production

Sanduhr-Anzeige-Programm (hourglass display program)

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#163

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

lqet wrote: post #158
Maxion wrote: post #23

Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from whi…

> has an integration with SAP There is your problem right there. A family member worked for a large German company which used in-house developed software for exchanging and preparing lab reports for customers. The software worked well since the 90ies, was perfectly tailored to the company, and the people writing it were in the same building and could ship bug fixes within hours. Everyone was happy. Around 2015, someo…

But did the manager get promoted?

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#164

Post by mschuster91 »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #95
tristor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent. The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. To find product-market fit you not only have to be better…

> The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. It's less that and more that governments and bureaucrats are corrupted to create barriers tot the market and to turn a blind eye to anti competitive behavior and outright illega…

> For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell.

German bank N26 was embroiled in money laundering, scams and other issues stemming from bad KYC for years, and all they got was a slap on the wrist from regulators.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#165

Post by twoodfin »

joe_mamba wrote: post #118
pcurve wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users " cracks me up. I once leased a BMW for 3 years. By the time I returned the car, I still didn't what all the cryptic buttons for HVAC and other controls. They just refused to follow established automotive ergonomic conventions. Anyway, my father used to do business with Germans for a long time. He had many i…

>how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals I think most people(Americans mostly) don't have the faintest idea how true that is right now. Here's a comment of mine from a few weeks ago giving such a present-day example that will blow your brains of how cheap german companies are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018023 I feel like German companies know they lost th…

I’m told that Germans in general are “cheap” and that this is an expected consequence of their economic policies designed to reinforce their industrial base.

I wish I could find the reference I’m thinking of, but the idea was that Germans buying absurdly cheap wine and their constantly underfunded trains were part of a pattern of deliberate domestic under-investment to keep exports competitive.

Someone ITT surely knows more.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#166

Post by speeder »

jarek83 wrote: post #98
wenc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software. The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterp…

BMW's most recent infotainment is a big step backwards to me in both areas - aesthetics and UX. Its previous generation was one of the best in the market also in both. I literally don't consider buying the newest 4-series just because of it, especially of the ultrawide driver's "monitor" - it's just so ugly, and I regret it, since on the outside the car appeals me so much more. I'd rather spend the same on previous y…

I worked on BMW infotainment for a time. My opinions are my own obviously, I don't even work at BMW anymore.

So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment dedicated hardware, one for the doors, one for the brakes, etc... now the cars have the least amount of computers as possible, located in the locations that result in the least wires as possible, with the goal of saving weight. Because of this, the software layer now had to deal with extra virtualizations, software that originally was to run on a specific microcontroller and do a specific task, and communicated with other parts by wire, now shares a generalized CPU with many other software, and communicate by virtual machines sending messages to each other.

Marvelous stuff from the point of mechanical engineering, indeed results in lighter car and less parts. But the end result for the user? It is mind bogglingly bad, several VMs running on top of each other, everything is slow, the Infotainment instead of being just Infotainment now do several other things.

I had written some of the surprising non-Infotainment stuff the Infotainment do, but that probably would cross into violating NDAs territory, so better not. Just let's say the Infotainment has to meet some non-entertainment related EU regulations.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#167

Post by ido »

marceldegraaf wrote: post #150
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I disagree. The ergonomics on my Miele are very good. It is clear that attention was paid to many details of using it.

I recently replaced the shock dampers on our Miele washing machine (~10 years old) and I was amazed how well designed and ergonomic the inside of the machine is. Parts are very easy to get at, all screws are Torx of identical size, and there's one very obvious way to take the machine apart and put it back together again. Made the replacement a breeze.

I think the whole premise of judging a whole country on some random product a company from that country made is rediculous. It's like saying Americans can't develop software because Microsoft screwed up Windows in the last few versions.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#168

Post by Gravityloss »

pcurve wrote: post #100
wenc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software. The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterp…

"if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users " cracks me up. I once leased a BMW for 3 years. By the time I returned the car, I still didn't what all the cryptic buttons for HVAC and other controls. They just refused to follow established automotive ergonomic conventions. Anyway, my father used to do business with Germans for a long time. He had many i…

I have long experience of multiple German car brands. The interface spectrum goes like this: driving and seats etc are close to perfect for me. As long as it's about buttons, they are really good. But once it goes to screens, it starts getting worse. And then, with mobile app, it's basically barely functioning at all.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#169

Post by mtct88 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #156
mtct88 wrote: post #140

I still don’t understand how this can be considered cheaper or more productive than using a human. I’m all for automation in industry, but the "human simulation" approach (where a robot mimics a human on a production line instead of using a process optimized for machine operation) just doesn’t make sense to me.

Most manufacturing operations have a long tail of stuff that is done by people because it's just not worth buying/designing a specialized machine for. That's exactly the stuff that people do currently that humanoid robots might step in and do cheaper. Employees cost roughly 70-120K per year. A lot of work in automotive is skilled work that pays relatively well. So, the economic case is easy to understand. That's why…

Employee costs vary greatly depending on where the factory is located. Here in Italy, a line operator costs around €60,000–70,000 per year, and half of that goes back to the government for public welfare redistribution.

Robots costs have a fixed CapEx that humans don't have. If they become expensive you can move the factory to a cheaper nation.

People keep saying that a humanoid robot will cost around €30,000, but is that just for the hardware, or does it include all the additional services required to operate it? Will they be as interchangeable as humans, who can be reassigned to a different task in 30 minutes without notice?

Honestly, it still doesn’t make sense to me; to use an analogy, it's like you're building and "horseless carriage" instead of a car.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#170

Post by pocksuppet »

menaerus wrote: post #155
mtct88 wrote: post #140

I still don’t understand how this can be considered cheaper or more productive than using a human. I’m all for automation in industry, but the "human simulation" approach (where a robot mimics a human on a production line instead of using a process optimized for machine operation) just doesn’t make sense to me.

It makes sense when you find out that there's only so much humans who want to do and are capable of doing that type of work. Also, robots are cheaper, and they are the opposite of humans - theyt are not emotional, lazy, feeling fatigue or any other spectrum of feelings or behavior ...

But why humanoid robots, instead of robots optimized for the task at hand?
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