Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

The Impact of Automation on Floor Workers: Real Insights

10 Jun 2025 · 2 min

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1:31

In this conversational segment, Speaker A asks Speaker B about the real‑world impact of shop‑floor automation on workers, especially when automating repetitive, mundane tasks. Speaker B shares his experience with early automation projects that replaced manual visual inspection. He explains that human inspectors quickly lose focus after a short period—about 20 minutes—making it hard to spot subtle defects, which leads to fatigue and reduced accuracy. Workers generally welcome automation that removes this monotonous task. However, their responsibilities shift: they must now define defect criteria and program vision systems to detect those defects, turning a purely manual role into a more analytical, supervisory one. The dialogue highlights both the ergonomic benefits of automation and the evolving skill set required from floor workers.

Chapters

So I wanna come back to kind of working with folks on the shop floor. I mentioned, and this is something that you and I had discussed prior, is oftentimes you're automating tasks that are very repetitive or not necessarily fun or can be quite mundane for people. So when you're working on an application, how often does it interact with people on the floor and what's really the impact that robots have on the day-to-day life of the worker? I know it can certainly vary based on, based on the specific application, but I'm curious to hear your experience kind of like in the trenches when it comes to automation. Yeah.
Yeah. The earliest ones that I did were automating away visual inspection. Okay. Because it's not necessarily that people don't want to do it or that employers don't want people doing it. It's that if you take an employee who's had a full pot of coffee and 8 hours of sleep, you've probably got about 20 good minutes outta that person looking at this thing over and over again before they go snow blind 100 parts in, and it all just kind of starts to look the same. And it's not any particular person's fault. It's kind of like a known effect that after so many minutes, you're, you've run out of oomph to really be able to identify very small defects and things like that. So most of those times, I feel people were kind of happy to not be having to do this all day as their job. Mm-hmm. And really kind of their job becomes identifying what is, what is it that I'm looking for when I'm doing this? And then programming a vision system to also see that.