4.20.2004
Mobile robots and factories
Robotics gets moving - Intelligent mobile robots are closer to being used in manufacturing plants than people think
From the article:
- AS NASA’s famous robots scout around the Red Planet looking for Martians and minerals, the bizarre looking machines seem far removed from the factory floor. But intelligent mobile robots like Spirit and Opportunity are closer to being used in manufacturing plants than many people would think.
- Cygler suggests that for more “clever” tasks to be carried out by robots, manufacturers should consider robots with vision based intelligent sensing systems. “The vision based system inspects the product, measures the product and recognises the product…Obviously that task could be done by a human, but a human actually could not do that task without the use of very special measuring devices…By the naked eye you couldn’t do it. Even by measuring with a gauge it would be time consuming. By using a robot with that specific type of device, this is done automatically, and very fast. It takes a couple of seconds.”
Wyeth said robot movements are also becoming more precise, allowing them to be used in new high accuracy applications.
“The big problem with precision manufacturing with a robot arm is that typically they have a series of motors, six motors in series one after the other and each joint or motor introduces a certain amount of inaccuracy in the tool point placement. The new type of robot structures are called parallel robots where instead of the actuators acting in series, they act in parallel. This means the two actuators can really work against each other to lock the tool point in place.”
Wyeth warns manufacturers to be aware that robotics is developing very quickly.
“There’s been a period of consolidation over the past ten years where a lot of robot arm technology and the software has become very good and the robots themselves have become incredibly reliable.
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