They are vastly more flexible than the latest in factory robots, which reach, blindly, for a point in space to weld or paint.

Interest in factory robots exploded in the early 1980's, when the Big Three auto companies seized on them as the answer to their labor and quality problems.

Some modern factory robots are "autonomous" within the strict confines of their direct environment.

July 21 - In Jackson, Michigan, a factory robot crushes a worker against a safety bar in apparently the first robot-related death in the United States.

In addition, the mismanaged introduction of automation into Cadillac plants in 1985 resulted in cars with many flaws and several incidents in which newly installed factory robots went wild.

A few days earlier, I'd been down at the rohobo jungle watching two gargantuan factory robots smash each other into junk.

One of the two factory robots had now fallen on its back, and the other was hammering it with a rock.

It plowed huge sums into factory robots that did not live up to expectations.

The Ford Motor Company has a system that diagnoses problems with its factory robots, saving engineers the need to leaf through hundreds of pages of reference manuals to find and fix a problem.

The commercial, intended to promote the quality of G.M. vehicles, showed the nightmare of a factory robot in which it is driven to suicide after losing its job for making a mistake.