The next robots will be more agile, the cords cut. They’ll be nimble enough to move around a warehouse, and manufacturing may be reshored to the United States. Of course, that won’t add up to as many jobs as you might think, because while they’ll be safe enough to collaborate with humans, they won’t require too many in the short run and hardly any in the longer term.

An excerpt from James Hagerty’s Wall Street Journal article about the nouveau machines:

Today, industrial robots are most common in auto plants—which have long been the biggest users of robot technology—and they do jobs that don’t take much delicacy: heavy lifting, welding, applying glue and painting. People still do most of the final assembly of cars, especially when it involves small parts or wiring that needs to be guided into place.

Now robots are taking on some jobs that require more agility. At aRenault SA plant in Cleon, France, robots made by Universal Robots AS of Denmark drive screws into engines, especially those that go into places people find hard to get at. The robots employ a reach of more than 50 inches and six rotating joints to do the work. They also verify that parts are properly fastened and check to make sure the correct part is being used.

The Renault effort demonstrates a couple of trends that are drastically changing how robots are made. For one, they’re getting much lighter. The Renault units weigh only about 64 pounds, so “we can easily remove them and reinstall them in another place,” says Dominique Graille, a manager at Renault, which is using 15 robots from Universal now and plans to double that by year-end.

Researchers hope robots will become so easy to set up and move around that they can reduce the need for companies to make heavy investments in tools and structures that are bolted to the floor. That would allow manufacturers to make shorter runs of niche or custom products without having to spend lots of time and money reconfiguring factories. “We’re getting away from the [structures and machinery] that can only be used for one thing on the factory floor and [instead] using robots that can be easily repurposed,” says Henrik Christensen, director of robotics at Georgia Institute of Technology.•