The robot apocalypse is hard to find in America's small and mid-sized factories

A worker operates one of the metal cutting machines at Gent Machine Co.'s factory in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., May 26, 2021. REUTERS/Timothy Aeppel

CLEVELAND (Reuters) - When researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology visited Rich Gent's machine shop here to see how automation was spreading to America's small and medium-sized factories, they expected to find robots.

They did not.