Stuntmovie - Manufacturing robots have come a VERY long way. As you've experienced some need human monitoring to help the robot organize his task a little, and some are very independent. I was visiting the factory of one of our sister companies over in Germany, they had one of the most bad ass robots I had ever seen. Its job was to weld together certain Air Conditioning components, and then stack them on a shelf behind it, it was amazing, it would pick up the components itself, weld the needed parts, and start stacking them, it had some sort of sensor that determined how many of these parts would go in a stack, and it did it soooo well, and knew where everything went. The person responsible of monitoring this robot, loved it, and told me that they run it on weekends and holidays and they have not had any sort of incidence. Not just that, but at times the robot, would need to do more than just weld, and it would pick the right tool from a shelf of tools and use it to do some work like drilling and hole punching, was one of the most incredible things I've seen in my line of work.
My company has a few robots (Welding, Punching, Paint, organization, etc), but nothing as sophisticated as what I've mentioned above, and that's purely because labor is pretty cheap in Egypt (where our factory is), so there has been no need to invest in some of the VERY expensive robots. Plus, the majority of our work is not mass production, but order by order and tailor made for the customer, so every job is different, we can't just throw the components on a line and put it together, its a bit more complex than that. And like you experienced yourself, it may just be more expensive for us to have to maintain these robots, than to just have it done by hand.
So it all really depends on the company and the task being performed. Its all about cost cutting, if a company can save money doing something with a robot (without impacting efficiency or even improving it) then they will use a robot, if its not worth it financially, then the company is better of not using it.
Also, something I thought of when you mentioned your big friend. We produce this one product, Air Jet Diffuser, which resembles something like a huge Cylindrical metal Tube. But to make these its extremely difficult and expensive, as you are taking flat sheets of metal and really expanding the metal into its tube shape, so we use this one HUGE guy who has to physically BEND the flat sheet metal and alter its shape on this rotating machine (its hard to explain how the process really goes), but the only thing you need to understand is a small weak person could not do the task, so we specifically hire a person who is STRONG and MUSCULAR for this job, and he gets paid more than the other factory workers due to the extent of the physical labor needed for this. And I tell you man, whenever I take any customers or partners on a factory tour, they are always so impressed by this one section, and the employee doing the job always feels so proud because people always take a million pictures of him as he works, he gets so excited, its pretty cool LOL This guy is known in our company as "The Muscle Man" LOL
