What Are 'Dark Factories,' and Do They Exist?

Could it be that we don't have "dark factories" because the moment a workshop turns into an autonomous machine, we reassemble something more complex out of those machines and need again a human operator to manage it? A few decades ago, it took a print shop with several employees to print a brochure. Then came the photocopier, which does it more or less automatically as a sort of "dark printer workshop". We even let them run without supervision in a dark office room. But we still needed someone to collect the copies, bind them, mail them, etc. Then photocopier and binding machine were combined, etc., etc. More and more gets automated and happens "in the dark", but there is always a frontier were human control or intervention becomes necessary. When we cross such a particular frontier, there is typically a new frontier that opens up, while the old frontiers are hardly perceived as such any more. Think of a water pump, for example: it is a "dark factory" that replaces a human-powered well, or of the heating system of a house that runs most of the time without direkt supervision.

I&#x27;ve been waiting for one of those factory simulator games to have something where when you pass some certain level in the game, it goes into Enders Game mode, and players start controlling machines in real factories. Users could even get paid to do this, and to scale up their operation with automation tools etc.<p>Same with farming simulators, mining simulators, fast food simulators, etc.

The way this looks like now (in the United States additive manufacturing industry) is that people, Zapier, and bits of scripting glue form the automation layer in most shops. This is really important, because labor costs <i>so much</i> more in the US compared to other manufacturing centers.<p>Companies that have attempted to achieve 100% automation (like YC-backed Voodoo Manufacturing) have gone out of business, because you still need people to run floor operations, do sales, handle customer accounts. What&#x27;s important is to give a few generalists no-code tools, so a machine technician can quickly iterate on a model without sending it back to a CAD designer.<p>Here&#x27;s one of my favorite examples of a 3D printing operation in the United States, if you&#x27;re curious what these businesses look like. Kason Knight started iSolids with a 3D printer in a spare linen closet. He&#x27;s now running a ~10 person operation out of a warehouse in Texas: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xPcA9uIgi7g">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xPcA9uIgi7g</a><p>Edited: typo

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment”

Ten years ago I was at a Phillip Morris cigarette factory for a two-week IT consulting project. The entire factory was off-limits to staff during operation.<p>Ingredients went in one side, cartons of cigarettes came out the other.

I&#x27;ve spent a decent amount of time visiting factories in the US and Asia, and despite &quot;how it&#x27;s made&quot; or other videos showing a ton of automation, so much of manufacturing requires people. Until you&#x27;re making millions of something or things which are super high value, automation of many assembly steps is often not economically viable. Certain steps are largely automated, like injection molding, or CNC, but so much of grabbing part A and inserting it into part B and adding screws is done by people. Toy manufacture is especially insane as so many little details are painted on by hand.

There is a halfway kind we called the lights out shift in a factory where I worked that only ran a day shift.<p>A couple of turning centres with bar feeders that were left running when we went home would run until a fault occurred or the parts hopper filled up.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lights_out_(manufacturing)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lights_out_(manufacturing)</a>

Mazda&#x27;s &quot;Mazda 3&quot; factory was a purpose build nearly full automation factory and that was a decade ago. I think they said it required something like only 7 people to run. I can only imagine the goal of no workers in a factory is even closer now.

Aren&#x27;t all modern 12 inch semiconductor fabs fully (100%) automated? As in. The WIP is too delicate to be handled by humans, and humans are only required for machine maintenance? Raw materials go in, and printed wafers come out.

Its usually called a lights out factory - and they some Japanese production facilities claim to run in this mode. Fanuc and Sony-Playstation comes to mind.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bQ-YkFzWj6o">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bQ-YkFzWj6o</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asia.nikkei.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;Companies&#x2F;PlayStation-s-secret-weapon-a-nearly-all-automated-factory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asia.nikkei.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;Companies&#x2F;PlayStation-s-sec...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lights_out_(manufacturing)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lights_out_(manufacturing)</a><p>My personal experience with robots and factory automation makes these claims rather dubious. There is always some stressed maintainer needed, at lest on standby. Factory equipment ages constantly and even &quot;durable&quot; parts, like the energy chains break regularly irregularly and it takes experience to detect and pre-emptively replace these. Until that &quot;flickering&quot; part is replaced, you have a constant series of increasingly occurring line stops. Including, product removal and NIO product increasing. Its possible to run a busy looking factory producing nothing but scrap for days.<p>Broken products and its residue clog at unexpected places, a thousand parts later, the glue from the packaging it arrives in, makes the unwrapping machine sticky. Dust that comes in with the package, accumulates or static charges transport actually non floating foils to unexpected places.<p>Nature finds a way, and spiders build there webs in front of light or capacity sensors. Even cats bring there young into some hidden cable spaces and thats a good thing, because they prevent rats from gnawing on the cables.<p>Finally, the cheapest bidder wins and makes factory equipment everywhere, especially if its new, prone to breakage and failure. Resulting in the maintainers, partially rebuilding machines with self-made parts until they are sturdy. Until that stage is reached, machines can have quirks, like vibrations moving sensors of position.<p>Also, the cheapest supplier also comes to plc software, resulting in horrific state-machines, waiting for ghost parts that left the system aeons ago and need careful massaging by maintainers to calm the enraged machine spirits (sometimes by hitting a robot with a wrench-&gt; It opens the safety circuit, resetting the programs base state).<p>Many robots are needed for very precise tasks, and need to re-calibrate in intervals to keep fulfilling there tasks. These error calibrations happen on top of the often used Non-parametric robot calibration<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robot_calibration" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robot_calibration</a>.<p>Its prone to move with temperature, moisture and alot of other parameters. Requiring a adaption of the programs used in industrial automation.<p>Finally, there are &quot;sales-failures&quot;, were the automation is sold, produced and then - never worked out. As in a dead &quot;abandoned channel&quot; of the assembly line. Its shown during factory tours as the &quot;future&quot; but the layer of dust and the missing traces of use give away, that it is not used in production. Usually its precision requirements that couldnt be met or would have required insane efforts. The Welding at Wendelstein comes to mind, were they created a &quot;reference frame via laser triangulation&quot; to prevent wrong welds, due to heat expansion of the material. Same insanity is usually applied to car manufacturing in germany, especially for the<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spaltma%C3%9F" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spaltma%C3%9F</a> obsessions, which regularly result in insane bake offs, with all kinds of robots, sensors and suppliers. That sort of machine just throws alarms, just from heavy equipment working nearby. No lights out there.<p>Ever.<p>Some guy sitting nearby, hitting the acknowledge and retry button after viewing up from the cellphone. So anal retentive quality control is a direct opponent of lights out, they want lights on all the time and fast detection of creeping in errors.<p>So, its a nice goal, but until machines can handle all of the above. No.

I was gonna say, at any given facility you&#x27;d need at least a man and a dog: the man to feed the dog, and the dog to make sure the man doesn&#x27;t touch anything.

This does seem like an inevitability. It will likely stamp out a lot of black market, after-hours manufacturing.

&gt; “Right now, we’re more in a state where companies are less interested in implementing the full dark factory concept and more focused on how automation can complement labor, and this nuance gets lost in the excitement of robots,” he said.<p>Right now, nobody wants to stand on the top of the mountain.<p>It looks like everyone wants to scale the mountain as fast as they can. But in fact, their primary concern is really just how to take their next mundane step!<p>Those mountain tops are safe folks! &#x2F;s &#x2F;h

&gt; Even if a fully automated facility exists, you probably still need at least some full-time employees to maintain that automation. So, is that truly a dark factory? Under the definition, no.<p>If any maintenence by a human means it&#x27;s not a &quot;dark factory&quot;, then they definitely don&#x27;t exist. That seems like a bizzare definition however. People aren&#x27;t claiming they have self maintaining facilities.

I worked for Kodak the summer of 85 as an intern. I&#x27;ve shared interesting things about that on HN before. But this just reminded me of something else. The Elmgrove facility where I worked had 15,000 employees and dozens of large buildings.One of the very large buildings had no windows at all. When I asked about it, my manger said that it&#x27;s all robots in that building.

The factory in Stanisław Lem&#x27;s <i>Eden</i> [0] matches the description.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eden_(Lem_novel)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eden_(Lem_novel)</a>

How I&#x27;ve wanted a container shop which builds what I have with stuff that is received by the container robots &amp; assembled within for shipping it out in another country completely!

You know the old saying about automation:<p>HN comments are written with a staff of one human and one dog. The dog posts the usual comment about a human and the dog. And the human feeds the dog.

One might note here that not all robots are created equal. Robots dependent on machine vision to function would need a lighted factory similarly to humans.

Some robots need vision.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.ros.org&#x2F;fiducials" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.ros.org&#x2F;fiducials</a>

Yes they do exist. LEGO, for one. And McDonald&#x27;s just launched a no-humans-required version in Austin, Texas.

I operate a dark factory. Currently relocating and retooling. Should be in full swing again by Q3.

&gt; ... There are certainly shades of gray in this concept.<p>Not quite dark - wouldn&#x27;t there be a red room then?

I’d imagine it’s a case of first 90% being easy but getting rid of supervising 10% is hard

One of the things Minority Report got right, was the chase scene in the factory.

I wish they would skip the factories and go straight to the fast food industry. I am tired of low paid teenagers ruining my fast food order! I look forward to our robot overlords!

Isn&#x27;t that was a server room is?

Obligatory Granddaddy reference:<p>“Supervisor guy turns off the factory lights<p>So the robots have to work in the dark”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=W1Ur6aV5Dc8">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=W1Ur6aV5Dc8</a>

You take this concept far enough and factories become like corporate bonds. Put money in, money comes out. The question ultimately becomes: if no-one’s labour is needed, do we need to retain money?