Robotics is one of the few general-purpose technologies that society may soon depend on to a great extent. As industries from manufacturing to healthcare struggle with long-term labor shortages, automation is often the way forward.

Although global robot installations keep growing and making new records, the technology is still new and unproven to most businesses – especially SMEs. So, what is keeping businesses from adopting robots at an even larger scale – like they have with computers and software, for example?

Unlike computer software, robots suffer from a double complexity: they are both physical and digital. Choosing, implementing, and operating a physical robot involves much more than moving bits over the Internet. They have to work in a physical setting. Besides taking longer to ship, the cost of choosing and implementing the wrong robot is often much higher than switching software. These are some reasons we still see geography playing a big role for businesses in terms of whether and how they adopt robots.

Buying a robot from the “integrator next door” has often been the safe path for businesses. By staying close to the end-users, integrators can easily access their facilities and respond quickly if a robot breaks down, needs reprogramming, or is due for service. Having the integrator close by also means end-users know who to call when they need a new robot—even if that means custom-building a solution from scratch, despite off-the-shelf solutions sometimes being available from other providers.

This may be part of why robot adoption has historically been “clustering” in certain areas. Most companies that use robots in the U.S. are concentrated in a few geographic hubs with other robot users and integrators, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found. Outside of those areas, robot adoption is limited.

The challenge with having robots concentrated in few places is that it could lead to some manufacturing falling behind, as Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the authors and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, notes.

However, some things are happening that could help change this. Our daily work with automation end-users and suppliers shows a growing interest in breaking down geographic barriers and making it easier to do business over longer distances.

COVID-19 taught us how to do meetings online. Can we also, perhaps, make it easier to discover, deploy, and service robots over a distance? 

Why robot supplier discovery is going online

One of the trends we see is that it’s becoming easier for businesses to find and choose a robotics supplier regardless of where they are located. The number of suppliers has increased vastly in recent years, as HowToRobot data shows, leading to a broader selection of standard solutions nationwide. The U.S. alone is home to more than 1,000 integrator businesses today. The increasing competition leads to specialization, which again increases the chances for end-users to find solutions that closely match their needs – if they know where to look. Even niche applications are seeing a growing number of suppliers. Want to automate a screw-driving job? There are already 77 U.S. integrators specializing in this at the time of writing.  

Finding a supplier often meant lots of meetings and traveling in the past. This, however, is becoming less needed today. With many suppliers to choose from, we see more and more businesses kickstart the sourcing process online and invite selected integrators to provide a range of budgetary quotes before doing any on-site visits. As these integrators can be located anywhere across the country, doing the initial supplier discovery and selection remotely helps end-users and suppliers save time and effort.

Site visits and in-person supplier meetings are still essential to building trust between both parties and conducting site visits, and we don’t expect any of this to go away completely. But we do see a larger part of the sourcing process becoming increasingly facilitated through digital platforms, as this is becoming the easier and more efficient route to finding the right supplier among the fast-growing number of robotics and automation businesses present today.

Robot deployment and service still dependent on the integrator’s presence

A necessary component of robot adoption is the supplier’s physical delivery and deployment of the solution, as well as ongoing training, service, reprogramming, etc.

Just as businesses can find a supplier and solution from across the country, it is also possible to have the solution shipped over a distance. However, doing the actual integration and providing ongoing support still depends on having the integrator present.

While end-users, in principle, are open to and interested in suppliers from any location, they often question how long travel distances may affect them. One thing is the cost of having a supplier travel across the country to install a robot solution, provide service, do repairs, and reprogram it when needed. At what point can this extra spending be justified? Another thing, often the most important one, is knowing that the supplier can be on-site at short notice when issues arise, so production downtime is kept at a minimum. This is often a make-or-break situation for the end-user.

To make robot adoption more accessible for businesses, these challenges must be dealt with. Some integrators partner with local service partners across the country to keep response times and costs low. Through our work facilitating projects between end-users and suppliers, we also see a growing number of contracts offering remote access to robot solutions from the supplier. The purpose is to troubleshoot and fix issues or reconfigure the solution remotely.

In addition, there’s also a growing focus among robotics companies on creating ‘plug-and-play’ solutions that are presented as easier to deploy, re-configure, and use by non-experts.

It will be worth considering if these trends – or others – can fully break the geographic barriers to robot adoption. Businesses are counting on it. Ultimately, with fewer geographical boundaries, the market for standard automation solutions in even more specialized applications can grow even further. This is one of the keys to enabling a broader adoption of robotics – not just in the U.S. but globally as well.