Measuring exposure
Air monitors detect Harvey pollution.
Rosie never complains about working all night or pulling double shifts. Neither does Rosie complain about wearing bright pink.
As long as pieces of pipe slide down the conveyor belt, Rosie the Robot will pick them up, clean them off, paint on a serial number and load them onto wooden pallets for delivery to customers.
Named after the maid in “The Jetsons” cartoon series, Tube Supply’s machine didn’t replace any human workers, it simply took away some of the drudgery in shipping custom pipe to the oil field. Rosie also demonstrates how robotics can make workplaces safer, more efficient and more profitable while improving the lives of humans.
Ninety-nine percent of Houston-based Tube Supply’s business is selling pipe for the oil field, and in recent years, companies have increasingly paid Tube Supply to pre-cut it to specific dimensions. To meet growing demand, the company invested in an automated Japanese pipe-cutting machine that is four times faster than old fashioned, human-operated band saws. They are also much less dangerous.
The automated saw, though, worked so fast that two workers had a hard time keeping up, said Cameron Sorenson, a project manager at Tube Supply. The company decided to take automation a step further.
“Time is everything. The ability to get it out the door quicker than our competitors is what will separate us from the rest,” Sorenson explained. “Some customers want 2,000 cuts, so to get those 2,000 cuts out in a couple of days versus a couple of weeks, has a huge benefit in service to the customers.”
Sorenson contacted Houston’s ARC Specialties, the robot manufacturer and systems integrator that I wrote about three weeks ago. Dan Allford, ARC’s CEO, helped Sorenson pick a German-manufactured robot that ARC could fit with an electromagnet to lift 200-pound
cuts of pipe.
The difficult part was programming the robot to perform tasks a human would find simple, even boring. On Tube Supply’s regular assembly lines, workers manually operate the saws and lift the pieces using a crane with an electromagnet. They clean away sharp metal shavings, stencil on part numbers and then stack the pieces on pallets.
Rosie’s software also needed to accommodate 2,200 different types of pipe that can be cut into an almost infinite number of lengths, Sorenson explained. Tube Supply is the first oil field pipe company to try to employ a robot in this way.
“This is really the test. If we start seeing that we can get more capacity out the door, then we will look at what else we can do with robots,” Sorenson said.
The day I visited, the automated saw was loaded with about a dozen 10-foot lengths of 8-inch pipe and it was cutting them into 893 pieces. A conveyor belt carried each cut piece to Rosie, which lifted it to an air nozzle that blew away the shavings and then spray painted the part number on the side with an ink jet. The robot can calculate the optimum way to stack the pieces on the pallets without overloading them.
“It makes my job easier. Before, I would cut the part and I’d have to pick up the piece myself,” said Jose Sandoval, who was retrained to operate the new production line. “I like that it’s better and faster. I just have to load the saw, program it and then I can do something else while it’s cutting.”
Sorenson said the company hopes automation will boost production by 25 percent but that employee safety was just as important.
“Your risk is none now, there is a very slim chance of a core breaking, a magnet going wrong or a piece falling,” he said. “You can make the argument strictly from a safety standpoint.”
Automation will also save jobs by making the company more competitive, said Paul Sorenson, Tube Supply’s president and co-owner.
“We’re not eliminating jobs,” he said. “We’re adding customer service.”
Automation, though, will eliminate the need for Tube Supply to hire more workers to get the same increase in production. And robots like Rosie will displace 24.7 million jobs by 2027, most of them manual labor, according to workplace research firm Forrester.
This technology will also create 14.9 million new engineering and operating jobs over the next decade, the company added.
This is how robots are already playing out in Houston. Tube Supply will not need to hire more manual laborers, but ARC Specialties will hire more engineers to install more robots. The result is a net loss of jobs, if the calculation were to end there.
Whether it was farming, textiles, manufacturing or even banking, new technology eliminated rote positions, but companies took the surplus labor and new capital to offer new services and products. The trick for workers is to adapt and not get left behind.
Based on historical trends, the Institute for the Future think tank estimates that 85 percent of the jobs in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. Social media and app developers, after all, didn’t exist 13 years ago.
What’s needed are good schools that prepare people for lifelong learning. Trying to slow automation is a fool’s game.
Those who embrace technology and the tyranny of change are the most successful among us. So don’t fear Rosie the Robot; figure out how to leverage it. Chris Tomlinson is the Chronicle’s business columnist. chris. tomlinson@chron.com twitter.com/cltomlinson www.houstonchronicle.com/ author/chris-tomlinson