Between men and robots in one of the production sites where Huawei radio equipment is born
Entering a Chinese manufacturing plant is not something that happens every day. Especially if the subject in question is called Huawei . Our Bruno had visited just over two months ago the production center located in Songshan Lake, Dongguan , in particular the Huawei P20 smartphone production line . On the day before the opening of the Huawei Analyst Summit in Shenzhen I also had the opportunity to enter some of the laboratories of the production center. I have already talked to you about the Independent Cyber Security Lab , also located in the complex of buildings of the first settlement of Songshan Lake.
After the hour spent talking about security I had the opportunity to enter the production site dedicated to radio solutions, such as the RRUs , Radio Remote Units , which are the backbone of the radio communications of operators and carriers . Impressive, but not photographable, the automated warehousein which the robots move in an automated way between shelves 10 meters high and take care of the two-way traffic entering and leaving, moving black boxes with bar codes on the conveyor belts which then run along the entire production site. Similar to those who bring back your suitcase after an air trip, but definitely more complex in terms of horizontal and vertical development and also for what concerns crossroads and junctions.
In the black boxes the components travel, packaged in long reels with perforated tape, which on the one hand protects the components inside the plastic film for use and on the other makes available to the machines chip, resistors, capacitors and other electronic components precisely. The production lines, from this point of view, are quite similar to those that we also find in Italy, like those of BTicino in Erba, which I had visited a few years ago.
Production lines that are increasingly replacing completely the human presence with that of robots, even for those tasks in which until recently workers were more 'flexible' , such as those less repetitive and more difficult to perform with a mechanical arm with an algorithm. In the production line at the moment there is still a hybrid approach, so in some tasks in one phase they are entrusted to people and instead in other points they are referred to robots, but the presence of the latter is growing, as evidenced by the fact that on the line of wireless products that I visited in a few years the number of employees has increased from more than thirty to just eight.
If the robots are the masters in the assembly of the components for some time now, often the quality control and the displacement of the components from one part of the line to the other was the prerogative of the employees, also due to the fact that being devices made to customer specifications , not all devices have a common path along the production line. But even in these activities I have seen a growing number of robots. Similar speech for quality control: if a person until recently was hardly beatable by a robot in taking a component (which can vary in size and weight) place it on a test bench, connect the cables and start the suite of test, the robots have gained a lot of ground here too.
I also met the robot that runs around the shed to continuously sample air quality and other environmental parameters. At the point where the transport chain of the components from the warehouse to the production was interrupted at one point, there were three workers working on allen and screwdriver, an unequivocal sign that for some tasks the human presence is still irreplaceable.