Technical Advances Help Industrial Manufacturing Robotics Be More Useful

One of the basic platforms for industrial manufacturing robotics is the articulated arm robot and its controller. This platform has been around a long time, but has been improved by technology advances. Industrial manufacturing robotics, which have several axes of movement, known as degrees of freedom, have had capabilities increased by advances in vision systems and advances in the ability of the controller, that is the brains of machine. The operation speed of the controller has gotten to be very quick and precise in its operation. Almost any manufacturing work cell that does repeated operations can be replaced with robotics that can work very accurately. Precise movement, perfect location, and speed are the hallmarks of robotic platform. With 6 axes of freedom the robotic platform has a broad utility that is created by the instruction sets that are sent by the controller to the robot to tell it how, when and where to do the work that is required. All the different angles of approach are cover by the 6-axes of the machine. The capability of this industrial worker is limited only by the instruction set that is provided by the controller. Programs can be changed quite readily or new programs can be loaded into the controller, so that many different tasks can be done by the work unit. Vision control for the robot has improved to a level that allows the robot to “see” objects with which it is to work. This vision gives the robot the precision needed to locate and pick up objects at any angle. It is amazing to watch an articulated robot picking up parts as they move down a conveyer belt. Every one of the parts is a different location on the belt, they are scattered all across the width of the belt. Yet the articulated arm does not miss a single one because it can “see” what it needs to do. All these tasks can be done at a very fast pace, in coordination with other production operations in the manufacturing cycle.

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