Climate Change Essay; It is the gradual increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature. It is caused by the emission of gases and particles into the atmosphere, and by the absorption of energy from the sun. The Earth’s climate has always been changing, but the rate of change has increased in recent decades.
Here are the articles to answer, in 1100 Words explain the Climate Change Essay for Students!
The Earth’s climate is determined by the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans. The atmosphere contains about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, and these gases trap energy from the sun. The oceans are a huge reservoir of heat, and they can slow or speed up the warming of the atmosphere.
Introduction to climate change essay and its effects.
Climate change in the world can be caused by various activities. When climate change occurs; temperatures can increase dramatically. When the temperature rises, many different changes can occur on Earth. For example, it can result in more floods, droughts, or heavy rain, as well as more frequent and severe heat waves. Oceans and glaciers have also experienced some changes: oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, glaciers are melting, and sea levels are rising. As these changes frequently occur in future decades, they will likely present challenges to our society and environment.
During the past century, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Most of the gases come from burning fossil fuels to produce energy. Greenhouse gases are like a blanket around the Earth, trapping energy in the atmosphere and causing it to warm. This is called the greenhouse effect and it is natural and necessary to support life on earth. However, while greenhouse gases build-up, the climate change essay and result in dangerous effects on human health and ecosystems.
People have adapted to the stable climate we have enjoyed since the last ice age which ended several thousand years ago. A warmer climate can bring changes that can affect our water supplies, agriculture, power and transportation systems, the natural environment, and even our health and safety. Some climate changes are unavoidable, and nothing can be done about them. For example, carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for nearly a century, so Earth will continue to warm in the future. What are the doubts about Cobots in Manufacturing?
Solutions to climate change.
Global warming has taken effect in the world over the last century. It is the unusually rapid increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century primarily due to the greenhouse gases released as people burn fossil fuels. Global warming is due to the enhancing greenhouse gases emission and build-up in the Earth’s environment. The gases that influence the atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, dinitrogen-oxide, and methane. Almost 30 percent of incoming sunlight is reflected into space by bright surfaces like clouds and ice.
In the other 70 percent, most are absorbed by the land and ocean, and the rest is absorbed by the atmosphere. The absorbed solar energy heats our planet. This absorption and radiation of heat by the atmosphere are beneficial for life on Earth. Today, the atmosphere contains more greenhouse gas molecules, so more of the infrared energy emitted by the surface is absorbed by the atmosphere. By increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases, we are making Earth’s atmosphere a more efficient greenhouse.
Climate has cooled and warmed throughout the Earth’s history for various reasons. Rapid warming like we see today is unusual in the history of our planet. Some of the factors that affect climates, like volcanic eruptions and changes in the amount of solar energy, are natural. Climate can change if there is a change in the amount of solar energy that gets to the Earth. Volcano eruptions can affect climate because it spews out more than just lava and ash when erupts. Volcanoes release tiny particles made of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.
The scientific consensus on climate change.
These particles get into the stratosphere and reflect solar radiation out to space. Snow and ice also have a significant effect on climate. When snow and ice melt Earth’s climate warms, less energy is reflected and this causes even more warming. There are many different ways that plants, animals, and other life on our planet can affect climate. Some can produce greenhouse gases that trap heat and aid global warming through the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere by plants as they make their food by photosynthesis. During the night, plants release some carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
Methane is made while farm animals, such as cattle and sheep digest their food. Cars and trucks can affect climate by releasing carbon dioxide when fossil fuels are burned to power them. When wildfires occur, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. However, if a forest of similar size grows again, about the same amount of carbon that was added to the atmosphere during the fire will be removed. Some effects that scientists have predicted in the past would result when the global change was occurring: loss of sea ice accelerated sea-level rise and more intense heat waves.
Scientists have confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come, largely due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that the extent of climate change essay effects on individual regions will vary over time and with the ability of different societal and environmental systems to mitigate or adapt to change. This has been the warmest decade since 1880.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2010 and 2005 have been the warmest years on record. The earth could warm by an additional 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 21st century if we fail to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels. The rising temperature will have significant effects on the earth’s climate patterns and all living things. Industrial activities that our modern civilization depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in the last 150 years.
In conclusion;
We need to take part and try to stop global warming and other effects of climate change essay. If the earth’s temperatures continue to rise in the future, living things on earth will become extinct due to the high temperatures. If humans contribute to controlling global warming, this world would be cooler and the high temperatures we currently have would decrease. If everybody as one takes a stand and tries to end most of the climate changes that are occurring, this world would be a safer place to live in.
Climate Change Essay for Students in 1100 Words; Image by Catazul from Pixabay.
What are some benefits of reading aloud or out loud for students? This assignment is my gain to the genuine step of my dissertation. In this assignment, I will discuss in detail what I will realize for my dissertation. First, I will discuss my subject and why I have chosen, it, and I will indicate my research questions and sub-questions. Next, I will identify key areas I compulsion to door very very just about and I will summarize 11 books and articles that meet the expense of useful scholastic background for my research.
Here are the articles to answer, Reading Aloud or Out Loud 2 Section Assignments Essay
What are some tips for reading aloud or out loud effectively? The topics I am keen on are associated with defining reading, later the process, models, methods of teaching reading, strategies readers use, and miscue analysis virtually reading strategies. What are the doubts about Virtual Reality Pros and Cons? This second section will pro taking place me construct the literature evaluation for my dissertation. Finally, I will characterize my research procedure and the research methods I am going to use.
Section 1 My topic and why I chose it;
My topic is about problems my pupils have in reading aloud and finding ways of improving my pupils’ reading aloud. What are the benefits of reading aloud or out loud? I have chosen this topic because in my experience as a teacher I faced and taught different kinds of pupils from different levels, I have found that most of them have problems with reading, particularly reading aloud.
Some of them are good at reading aloud but have many do substitute for other words, and have omission of words or letter sounds while reading. This could be due to a lack of sight vocabulary, lack of phonic skills, or lack of strategies for reading. Some of them can’t produce a single word. I discovered that pupils were learning nothing if they could not read aloud. My pupils who cannot read aloud have general difficulty in decoding any reading text successfully.
I believe my research is important because reading aloud is very important for my pupils in grade 9, which is closer to the final school-leaving examinations in grade 12. I hope it may able me and my colleagues to find the diagnoses to help the participants and in the future to help all my pupils with their reading problems. In my research, I will try to analyze and describe their miscues in reading aloud according to their levels of good, average, and weak.
That time I couldn’t do anything about it because I didn’t have the experience to help them. After I joined the B. A course and studied EDUC 2031 TEYL, EDUC2033 Initial Literacy, and EDUC2028 Language learning from these modules I realized the nature of young learners how do they learn, how do they acquire a new language, and how to teach reading to young learners.
As I understood the older ways of teaching reading focused on letters and words and how to say them, all language books are concerned with that view only. The new research showed a different view that relies on the development of all language skills so because reading in a second language is seen as a thinking exercise that’s not only concerned with reading words, sentences, and pages only but it is with developing language as a whole.
Reading is the main reason to build the personality of a person as I mentioned before and it is the main thing that teaching and learning stand on because it is a communication way between the learner and the academic culture in the schools. I would like my pupils to be able to use reading for study, for pleasure, to understand and to interact with what they learning.
My pupils are in grade 9 of the general education school at the age of 14 years old with different ability levels. They have been studying English for five years only using ‘Our World Through English’. They started learning English in grade 4. In addition, they are similar in many things such as pupils’ environment, strengths, and weaknesses areas they have.
I decided to do research for my dissertation where I will focus on finding the difficulties my pupils face in reading aloud and helping me find ways to improve my pupils in reading aloud. Although my research will focus on reading aloud, from my experience a pupil cannot read aloud well, he can have little or no comprehension when he read silently. My research question is:
How can I develop the reading aloud abilities of my grade nine pupils?
My sub-questions will be:
What miscues do my good pupils and weak pupils make when reading aloud?
Based on my miscue analysis, what reading strategies do my good pupils and my weak pupils use when reading aloud?
What reading strategies can I encourage my pupils to develop to improve their reading?
In my research the subjects will be six pupils from 2 of them are good, the other 2 are average and the last 2 are weak pupils)
Section 2 Summaries of relevant literature;
What are some common problems people experience when reading aloud or out loud? The key areas I will need to read about for my research are:
reading process
models of reading
Methods of teaching reading.
reading strategies
miscue analysis
How miscue analysis can be used to identify the reading strategies that pupils use and the errors they make.
In this section, I discuss 11 books/articles that I want to use for my dissertation because they will help me to develop my understanding of issues related to my research. What are the doubts about Cobots in Manufacturing? The aspects that are relevant to my study are summarized below.
Urquhart and Weir (1998);
Urquhart and Weir discuss three models of reading and I will state them here:
Bottom-up approach. They say these analyses begin with the stimulus, i.e. the text, orbits of the text. They say that in Gough’s (1972) model, the reader begins with letters, which are recognized by a scanner. The information thus gained is passed to the decoder, which converts the string of letters into a string of systematic phonemes, then word, then sentence then text. So ‘bottom-up models are sequential in that one stage is completed before another is begun.
Top-down approaches. Since bottom-up models start with the smallest text unit, either letters or letter features, we could expect, then, those top-down models to begin with the largest unit, the whole text. According to Urquhart and Weir for a top-down model of reading, readers first use their background knowledge to help them make sense of the text. So for top-down approaches background knowledge is very important.
Interactive approach. In interactive models (Urquhart and Weir refer to Rumelhart, 1977), there is no regular sequence from top to bottom or from bottom up. They quote Stanovich ‘the best-known proponent of interactive models’, that in interactive models a pattern is synthesized based on information provided simultaneously from several sources’ (1980:35). So in interactive approaches reader uses both small text units and background knowledge to make sense of a text at the same time.
Urquhart and Weir describe reading strategies to be a conscious response to difficulties in the text while reading action selected deliberately to achieve goals (Is this a Quotation?).
Aebersold and Field (1997);
Aebersold and Field also have sections on models of reading. They also focus on the reader’s experience in learning how to read and the ways reading fits into their lives. They give five common influential sources for information that affect reading development, particularly family, the community, and the school influence. They mention that despite its relatively small size, a family can foster a variety of experience that affects a child’s reading development.
They say that the community influence provides readers with a set of varied life experiences that also shape their knowledge. Thirdly the school can bring children into contact with communities other than their own or they can be a homogeneous institution that reflects shared values. This is interesting because in Oman children learn English without much support from the family or the community and school does not bring children in contact with many other communities.
Riley (1996);
This article has a section on models of reading. The author discusses how schema theory describes the process by which readers combine their background knowledge with the information in a text to help them comprehend that text. All readers carry different schemata (background information) and these are also often culture-specific. This is an important concept in ESL teaching, and many books have pre-reading tasks that are designed to build or activate the learner’s schemata. The author also highlights some of the limitations of the use of the schema-theory approach and points out the importance both of developing the learner’s vocabulary and of encouraging extensive reading.
Wray and Medwell (1991);
This article focuses on the reading process, models of reading, and approaches to teaching reading.
In the reading process, they mentioned that reading is a highly complicated process, and there are several insights and concepts that the successful reader must develop. In models of reading, they discuss bottom-up models, top-down models, and interactive models and they strongly criticize the bottom-up model. They also have a section on teaching reading approaches – look and say phonic methods of teaching reading, and language experience approach. I discuss these under Graton and Spratt (1998) below.
Graton and Pratt (1998);
This book has useful sections on methods of teaching reading (whole word, phonics, language experience ) and the methods teachers can use to teach pupils how to read. Most teachers use these methods to help their students in reading, sometimes they choose one of these methods but some teachers work on two or more because they think each method is completed by the other.
The phonic method is widely used by language teachers to teach reading and writing in English for second language learners. It relies on children being taught the alphabet first. Then they learn to pronounce the sounds of the letters. However, it is difficult to depend only on phonics because English is not a regular spelling language. The second method is ‘look and say’ or the whole word method. Here pupils learn to recognize whole words or sentences rather than individual sounds.
The pupils will look at a word that the teacher sound, often with a picture, and in turns will repeat the word. The problem is that it does not teach children to work out new words for themselves. The context support method can be used when the pupils are just learning to read and it is important to choose exercises or activities that interest them. If the pupils like cars, choose an activity or exercise with pictures and simple words about cars. This will keep their interest and they will enjoy learning with the teacher.
O’Malley and Valdez Pierce (2001);
O’Malley and Valdez Pierce give a useful part about miscue analysis (p 124-5). They say it involves listening to a student reading aloud and recording the miscues. In types of miscues, they mention repetitions, substitutions, insertions, omissions, and self-corrections. They also recommend the teacher must get the student to answer reading comprehension questions. They say miscue analysis can provide information about (1) the readers’ ability to use language and the reading process (2) it can be used for assessing reading, the reader’s approaches to reading and reading comprehension (3) information for revising approaches to teaching reading, how it can be used by teachers effectively to improve their learners reading.
This book has useful lists of reading strategies (p 121-123) and suggests how miscue analysis can be used to identify reading strategies readers are using. The authors talk about reading in the native language and then reading in a second language, which I am interested in. The writers said that learners who do have native language literacy skills might not know how to transfer their skills to the second language without specific strategy instruction.
Carter and Nunan (Eds.) (2001);
Carter and Nunan (Eds) (2001) define reading strategies as ‘Ways of accessing text meaning which is employed flexibly and selectively in the course of reading. In teaching, attention is paid to how the reader can draw effectively on existing linguistic and background knowledge. They list the good reading strategies that learners use to help them read in a very efficient way, to get the maximum benefit from their reading with minimum effort. These include drawing inferences, predicting, and using the information in the text such as pictures.
They also discuss miscue analysis about reading strategies:
As they say, miscue analysis refers to ‘the study of the text alterations conducted by the subject while the pupil reads the text and would be very impossible without reading aloud’. Carter and Nunan (Eds) (2001) assert that for early readers miscue analysis can be used by teachers to assess the quality and quantity of learners’ errors in their processing of text. First, this is especially useful for L2 learners ‘who because of their interlanguage system may show systemic syntactic and phonological departures from Standard English’. In addition, they argue that miscues will be based on learners’ current interlanguage rather than because of a misunderstanding of the text.
Wallace (2001) p26 in Carter and Nunan (2001);
Wallace discusses miscue analysis and she focuses on how miscue analysis can be used for early readers to assess the quality and the number of learners’ errors.
Beard (1987);
Beard has a section on miscue analysis and methods of teaching reading (whole word, phonics, language experience). The author focuses on miscue analysis and gives some models of how to use miscue analysis to develop pupils’ reading and how ‘miscue analysis can fulfill an important diagnostic function of a kind not readily offered by other more established means of reading assessment.’
Cameron (2001);
The author has sections on reading strategies, models of reading (bottom-up, top-down, and interactive), methods of teaching reading(whole word, phonics, language experience ) and discusses how miscues can help the teacher identify the reading strategies a reader is using. The author gives an example from her experience of reading with a little Malaysian girl. The author mentioned that she had introduced her to the strategies such as:
With the word ‘bar’, I pointed to the first letter, the sound of which she knew, and then she managed to sound out the word’.
With the word ‘rather’ I just told her the word and did not spend any time on it, because it was not crucial to the meaning of the story and is not a particularly useful word to learn at her stage’.
ith the word ‘meals’ I told her the word and then explained the meaning as the story progressed and the heroine moved from breakfast to tea.’
When she came to ‘watching TV’ she said ‘washing’. From this miscue, I could see that she was making a good attempt at the word and had noticed the initial consonant and the final rime.’
According to www.mindtools.com/pages/articals/ miscue analysis refers to the study of text alterations made by the subject while s/he reads the text aloud. They summarise the research of Clay, Goodman, and Weber (Davies 1995, p13) and they give a useful list of types of miscues. They say that the alterations often made by a reader are:
Substitution (another word is pronounced instead of the printed word)
Self-correction (the reader realizes his/her mistake and corrects him/herself.)
Repetition (the printed word is repeated orally)
Omission (a word is missed from the text)
Insertion (a word not in the text is added by the reader)
Reversal (the word order gets changed or inverted)
Hesitation (the reader pauses or makes a sound indicating hesitation)
A long pause.
The article also relates the miscues to approaches. It says that if a reader shows more hesitations, long pauses, and self-correction, this shows a bottom-up approach with the reader giving most attention to pronouncing the printed words. If a reader shows more miscues such as omission, insertion, reversal, and substitution, this shows a more top-down approach where the reader is paying attention to the meaning of the whole text, not reading word by word.
How I will investigate my research question;
As discussed above, my research question will be ‘How can I develop the reading aloud abilities of my grade nine pupils? ‘
My Approach:
For my approach and method, I read Blaxter, Hughes, & Tight, (2000), Cohen, Manion, & Morrison (2000), and Nunan (1992). Duty of Care Law English and Irish Approaches 2000; For my research approach, I will use an action research approach enabling me to investigate my pupils over a period. Action research grows from the idea that a good teacher reflects on what happens in the classroom – possibly changing it.
My Method;
For my research, I will plan to use miscue analysis and interviews. The miscue analysis will provide quantitative data and the interviews will provide qualitative data. I will select a text from the coursebook which is not familiar to my pupils, I will let them each read aloud this text, I will record them while reading, then I will use miscue analyses to help me analyze their mistakes. Finally, I will interview each pupil, I will ask questions to assess their comprehension of the text, to get them to tell me what strategies they used to work out the meanings of some words, and to try to find out why they failed to read certain words correctly.
The research Procedure;
My research will include an unknown reading text from the OWTE coursebook that the six pupils will read to have effective and organized results for my research question. This text from the coursebook OWTE that I think will be not familiar to the pupils because I gave it to them for the first time. First I will use pre-reading questions to prepare each pupil for the reading. Pre-reading is a way of sampling where the students are familiar with the content that you are going to give them.
It is a useful strategy for beginning with a class, especially when classes contain students with mixed abilities coming from a diversity of backgrounds. Then each pupil will read the text and I record it. Then I will note down all the miscues. Finally, I will interview them to examine their understanding, assess their comprehension of the text, get them to tell me what strategies they used to work out the meanings of some words, and try to find out why they failed to read certain words correctly.
My Expectations:
I expect some problems, and here I discuss how I will overcome them:
Miscue analysis, I cannot assume that any two pupils will have the same miscues. In addition, anxiety may cause artificial results. To overcome these problems, I will choose six pupils from different levels. I will try to get them relaxed, so I will tell them about the reason for my research, and I will do the recording in a quiet place, so we are undisturbed.
Pupils may feel boring from doing reading every time, so I must prepare a good situation for them to feel comfortable. The main problem I think is the time. These kinds of studies should not be used in a short period because the researcher needs to try many ways to investigate his pupils and his study to collect valid, reliable data.
Conclusion;
The EDUC 3079 helped me a lot in finding solutions for many problems that I will face in the future in my life as a teacher to help my pupils to reach success in their life as students. I learned how to read a lot and how to use linguistics theories to help my pupils learn and discover the problems. The use of miscue analysis is a very useful way to solve pupils’ weaknesses in reading because it allows me to focus on the problem itself, and how to deal with each problem individually.
Reading Aloud or Out Loud 2 Section Assignments Essay; Image by StockSnap from Pixabay.
Cobots in Manufacturing Assignments Essay; This suit testing involves Intelligent Assist Devices (IADs) which are a supplementary class of hybrid devices for settlement behind, alive thing, relationships when a human operator is in shared workspaces. These devices – expected for the assembly pedigree worker – can admission ergonomics concerns that arise due to upon-the-job beast and cognitive loading, even though improving safety, air, and productivity.
Here are the articles to answer, What are the 5 benefits of using Cobots in Manufacturing?
Cobot, a.k.a. collaborative robot works along gone humans in completing tasks in manufacturing. Cobots in Manufacturing, Unlike robots which are mainly used in just easy repetitive tasks that are easy to replicate, cobots can do their stuff later-door door to humans and even learn from them.
Introduction;
Today’s manufacturers are faced with increasing cost pressures, growing product diversity, and fluctuating demands. Even where workers are affordable, this new generation of complex products requires assembly adaptability, precision, and reliability that is beyond the skills of human workers alone. To be prepared for this high-mix, low volume era, manufacturing methods must be flexible and automated.
Cobots in Manufacturing, Traditional industrial robots continue to evolve to meet today’s automation needs, with a broad mix of form factors, payloads, and capabilities. But new automation opportunities are also emerging for variable and semi-structured environments, especially in small and mid-sized businesses.
Cobots due to their ability to work side-by-side with employees, these lightweight, flexible tools can be easily moved and reprogrammed to solve new tasks. User-friendly, affordable cobots are lowering the automation barrier by a lot, enabling automation in areas previously considered too complex or costly. While the stereotype was that the cost of a robot would be a lot, collaborative robots are almost just a quarter of the price of a robot.
What are Cobots?
Cobots, or collaborative robots, are robots intended to interact with humans in a shared space or to work safely nearby. Cobots stand in contrast to traditional industrial robots which are designed to work autonomously with safety assured by isolation from human contact. Cobot safety may rely on lightweight construction materials, rounded edges, and limits on speed or force. Safety may also require sensors and software to assure good collaborative behavior. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), a global industry association of robot manufacturers and national robot associations, collects statistics on two types of robots;
1) industrial robots used in manufacturing.
2) service robots for domestic and professional use.
Service robots can be considered to be cobots as they are intended to work alongside humans. Industrial robots have traditionally worked separately from humans, behind fences, but this is changing with the emergence of industrial Cobots. Cobots can have many roles. Collaborative service robots can perform a variety of functions, from information robots in public spaces; to logistics robots that transport materials within a building, to inspection robots equipped with cameras and visual processing technologies that can serve in a variety of applications such as patrolling perimeters of secure facilities.
Collaborative industrial robots can be used to automate repetitive, unergonomic tasks – such as fetching and carrying heavy parts, machine feeding, and final assembly. Industrial robots have traditionally been used in industrial sectors for pre-assembly tasks such as cutting, welding, basic assembly of car bodies, and painting. Collaborative industrial robots enable automotive and electronics manufacturers to extend automation to final product assembly, finishing tasks (for example polishing and applying coatings), and quality inspection.
Cobots in Manufacturing, Cobots can also be categorized as follows:
Independent;
An operator and a cobot operate on separate workpieces (W1 and W2 illustrated in Fig. 1) independently for their manufacturing processes (P1 for W1 and P2 for W 2). The collaborative element is due to the co-presence of the operator and cobot in the same workspace without a fence or guard. Are cobots safe? That is safety is achieved through the cobot’s intrinsic safety and/or added hardware/software safety elements. Therefore, the Cobot is aware of the operator’s presence and acts safely.
Simultaneous;
An operator and a cobot operate on separate processes (P1 and P2 respectively) on the same workpiece (W) at the same time. There is no time or task dependency between them. However, the Cobots need to be spatially aware of the operator and his/her task requirements to respect the operator’s space. Being able to concurrently operate on the workpiece will minimize the transmit time of the workpiece between the cobot and human, thereby improving productivity and space utilization.
Sequential;
An operator and a cobot perform sequential manufacturing processes (P1 and P2) on the same workpiece. There are time dependencies between the cobot and operator for their processes. For instance, the cobot works on P1 for the workpiece as an input to support the operator to carry on P2 for the workpiece. In most cases, the cobot is arranged to handle tedious processes to improve the operator’s working conditions
Supportive;
An operator and a cobot work towards the same process (P) on the same workpiece (W) interactively. There is a dependency between the actions of the Cobots and the operator. That is, without one, another cannot perform the task. The cobot needs to understand the operator’s intent and the task requirements to provide appropriate assistance. For instance, the operator fastens screws on a toolbox while the cobot holds it in place. The role of the cobot is to physically assist the operator with workpieces that improve ergonomics.
The roles that Cobots play;
The typical workshop has been transformed by the advent of robots. From unsafe, harsh conditions have been mitigated while simultaneously freeing up workers for tasks that are more enjoyable and less stressful.
The ergonomics and productivity consequences brought by manufacturing across all industries are documented as follows:
43% of workers sustained injuries and illnesses were due to bodily reaction and exertion;
62% of all illness cases were due to repeated trauma disorders;
32% of cases involving days away from work resulted from overexertion or repetitive motion.
The total cost of these consequences to the US industries is enormous and it happens every year. The impact of this problem is so big that shouldn’t be ignored.
Cobots are created to address some of the above problems. And it is not only just for the whales in industries, and also for small and medium businesses. (SMBs) Cobots help meet the short-run production challenge faced by many SMBs, bridging the gap between fully manual assembly and fully automated manufacturing lines. Cobots in Manufacturing, This is helping small business owners address overseas competition with affordable automation solutions that can be deployed in a wide range of applications.
As these small businesses compete more effectively, their growth can drive the use of additional automation solutions, including multiple cobots—or another form of collaboration, between cobots and traditional industrial robots for high-speed, repeatable applications. Another good thing about cobot is that it can be highly cost-effective as it can be programmed to operate 24/7 in lights-out situations for continuous production.
What are the prospects for cobots in manufacturing? The relevance of cobots in manufacturing;
Manufacturing companies are eager to deploy Cobots due to their affordability, built-in safety, and intuitive User Interfaces (UIs). That is especially true for SMEs that have difficulties automating their manufacturing using traditional robots. Mass production companies, particularly automotive manufacturers, are equally eager to implement HRC to boost their competitiveness and take their factories to the next level of automation and manufacturing advancement, i.e. Industry 4.0.
For instance, the BMW Group’s Spartanburg site introduced cobots to improve ergonomics by taking over the repetitive and precise task of equipping the inside of car doors with sound and moisture insulation. Audi introduced a UR3 cobot to apply an adhesive on a car roof, which saves factory floor space since the Cobots do not have to be separated from the human by a fence. The Volkswagen plant is in locations that are inconvenient to reach by a human operator. The cobot works alongside the human who is screwing at other easily accessible locations.
Nissan’s large-scale Yokohama plant deployed UR10 cobots to loosen bolts and carry heavy components to relieve the workforce of these arduous tasks and speed up the manufacturing process. Skoda also introduced a KUKA cobot to work alongside humans in the production of direct-shift gearboxes. In all the aforementioned tasks, Cobots are required to operate safely alongside humans, which is a built-in feature in cobots. However, they do not strictly require advanced perception, human awareness, or decision-making capabilities since the parts handled are kept in pre-determined positions, the tasks of the human and the cobot are relatively independent, and the cobot adheres to a relatively fixed action/motion plan.
Therefore, it is noticeable that industrial implementation of HRC scenarios falls under the category ”Independent” or ”Simultaneous”. However, by enforcing additional constraints upon the cobots’ environment (in terms of fixed parts or equipment positions), most of such implementations fail to showcase the utility and versatility of cobots in a partially unstructured work environment.
However, humans rely a lot on communication to work in teams and to complete tasks fluently and effectively. Communication can be made to issue orders, convey intention and ask/answer questions. Researchers have been working on enabling communication between humans and cobots such that humans can command the cobot through different communication modes.
First and foremost, body language and speech. Body language as a means of commanding cobot includes using gestures, pointing, head pose, etc. Speech refers to uttering commands verbally. But, at the end of the day, Cobots aren’t human, they need to be trained to be able to work alongside humans. They learn while they work through machine learning. Communications can be complex for example, different gestures/commands can mean differently in different situations. This is can be avoided by such and such command being predefined strictly in a fixed set. Generating a natural language system is challenging since the language use differs drastically as the operator progresses with work.
Nakata et al. showed that in a collaborative task where only verbal communication is allowed, the frequency of morphemes (i.e. words belonging to these certain types: object, modifier, robot action, user action) decreases as the number of task trials increases. That is because humans naturally start emitting words as they become accustomed to the task. They naturally start considering and accommodating their teammates’ needs without those needs being explicitly expressed. Kobayashi et al. also showed that the use of descriptive words decreases as the number of task trials increases. Therefore, any language model between a human and a cobot should account for the change in human language as the human becomes more accustomed to the task.
Cobots in eliminating Manufacturing Jobs;
Cobots not only doesn’t eliminate manufacturing jobs, but also provide more job opportunities, and make manufacturers even more globally competitive. This is because Cobots are available for everyone not only for the big companies. In manufacturing work, a lot of manpower is needed previously. Now, cobots free up a lot of manpower to let companies maximize workers’ skills in other areas of business. It also creates a safer, more desirable working environment for workers as the job that cobots do are usually boring and repetitive, dangerous.
Not only that, some countries which lack manpower in the mass production lines are already fixed with cobots available. Today’s labor market includes fewer skilled manufacturing workers due to decades of offshoring, and cobots come in handy to eliminate the shortfall. Talk about globally competitive, automation in manufacturing allows domestic companies to be price-competitive with offshore companies because of mass production in a shorter period. As cobots are available 24/7 of the time, it increases the production rate of the product to meet the demand rate with minimal costs.
As cobots can do work precisely and quickly, it is always able to achieve customers’ desire which easily offset their upfront costs as well. Cobots in Manufacturing; Cobots are good in helping manufacturers break the ceiling of output capacity as well. Last but not least, cobots are economically friendly as well. It not only doesn’t emit greenhouses, but it also helps in reducing the energy consumption of factory as well, cobots doesn’t need lighting to function 24/7 so they can create cleaner spaces also.
The opportunity of Cobot in the UK;
There is a huge opportunity for UK manufacturers to adopt robotics and artificial intelligence, but a key barrier to implementation is often a lack of understanding of how to effectively introduce these technologies into the business. Cobots in Manufacturing, Arguably the UK manufacturing landscape is built up of traditional organizations that adopt conservative approaches to business, as opposed to modernization.
Barclays Corporate recently found that there is still resistance from UK manufacturers when it comes to adopting the latest and greatest innovations and is falling behind other nations when it comes to adopting fourth industrial revolution technologies. Yet, innovation in automation and robotics is happening in pockets across the UK manufacturing sector. The University of Lincoln’s National Centre for Food Manufacturing and supplier English Provender, for example, recently announced an R&D project introducing state-of-the-art robotic arms to weigh out powdered ingredients with more accuracy and with the overall goal of reducing food waste in the supply chain.
These types of initiatives gain a lot of awareness and traction in the sector as the ROI is usually fruitful, yet generally, across the board, the UK is falling behind when it comes to robotics. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) highlighted that the UK sits 22nd in the world for robot density behind nations such as Slovakia and the Czech Republic. UK manufacturing is, however, on the cusp of further global recognition and RPA could be the enabler of getting Britain back on the map.
Cobots in Manufacturing, Recent successes in British exports has meant that the UK manufacturing sector is set to outpace the rest of the economy this year and as such, experts are anticipating that by 2021, the UK will climb from number eight in the global manufacturing economy to fifth place. Yet, to remain competitive the UK manufacturing sector must continue to cultivate and invest in emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and robotics, putting digital change at the beating heart of growth strategies and making operations smarter, freeing up workers’ time to focus on innovation and creativity.
Conclusion;
What challenges must be addressed when implementing Cobots in manufacturing? The above quote which was said by Henry Ford doesn’t mean that humans alone cannot achieve mass production but machines, mass production can be easily achieved with the right machines. Computer-controlled, intelligent assist devices are a huge change in material handling technology today. The step changes in their ergonomics, productivity, quality, and safety capabilities – especially when compared with traditional pneumatic tools which are considered old schooled in comparison with cobots today.
It wouldn’t be a surprise to see cobots will lead to a revolution in manufacturing over the next few years. Yes, there are fears that large sections of the workforce will be made redundant by the increased automation, but these fears may be unfounded. For instance, the workers at a Nissan plant in Tennessee were nervous about being laid off when cobots were introduced, but no jobs have been lost, and the staff has been very receptive to them. They have realized that these machines are there to help them and the company, rather than replace them.
Cobot is the way to go for today’s trend and generation. I believe that Cobots don’t only make manufacturers’ life easier and also the customer’s as well. Cobots in Manufacturing; Cobots create a cleaner, safer, and technically more fun environment for people to work in as it enables people to customize the way cobots act for different operations which are mostly software-based.
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The 5 benefits of using Cobots in Manufacturing; Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
