Reindustrialization won’t work without robotics

The article "Reindustrialization won’t work without robotics" argues that the United States’ efforts to bring manufacturing back onshore—through tariffs, tax incentives, and “Made in USA” initiatives—cannot succeed without widespread adoption of production robotics. Traditional labor-intensive methods are economically unviable given high domestic labor costs and skill shortages. Robotics, particularly advanced machine tending robots capable of autonomously loading, unloading, inspecting, and testing a wide variety of parts, are essential to achieving the scale, speed, precision, and cost-effectiveness needed for competitive U.S. manufacturing. These robots, integrated with precision sensors and automated testing, help ensure quality and compliance critical to industries like aerospace, defense, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors. However, despite the clear economic benefits, scaling robotics across factories faces significant challenges. Current implementations are often isolated “islands of automation” with standalone robots that require extensive custom coding and suffer from poor integration with factory machinery and IT systems. This lack of seamless process integration leads