An industrial robot is a limited-intelligence machine used in an industrial environment for efficiently performing repetitive tasks. Industrial robotics has always remained in the forefront of the application potential of robots.
Industrial robots have been traditionally used in the automobile industry for material handling and welding. Currently, more than a million robots work in industries right from assembly operations in car manufacturing plants to bin handling and part identification tasks in inventory stores in production.
The leading company in the world manufacturing industrial robots is ABB of Sweden. It is followed in second place by Fanuc of Japan and then by Kuka Roboter of Germany in the third position. While Fanuc has been the leader in the development of vision guided robots (VGRs), intelligence features, and humanoids (robots with human like external features), ABB leads the race in terms of numbers. The latter manufactures approximately 10,000 robots per year.
Industrial robots have come a long way today from the time their development was in its infancy. Currently, the main stress in the development of industrial robots is on vision guidance. This is mainly achieved by the use of sensors and cameras in robots. It helps the robots to reduce errors and enhance the level of quality.
Another facet of industrial robot development that has received impetus in recent years is in the implementation of a multi-arm control mechanism. While part of the robot engages in material handling tasks, another part uses vision-guided control to weld two parts together with high precision.
Such control is established by simply changing the end-of-arm tooling on robots that handle material. Bin picking applications have recently received much needed boost from the development of 3D vision on industrial robots.
The development has been made possible because of untiring efforts of a robot manufacturing company named Motoman. It uses software to support 3D vision by using and integrating it with more than one camera in the robot or in a fixed location.
All three elements of 3D vision, namely yaw, pitch, and roll can be controlled through the Motoman software. This makes the bin picking of complex parts very much possible without the use of a slew of sensors and lasers.
The advantage of VGRs lies in their ability to perform complex precision tasks that hitherto had to be performed using costly fixtures and a complex array of human-robot interaction. The earlier arrangement had a much lower efficiency than can now be achieved using vision guidance control. Another facet is that operations are more simplified using vision guidance control.
Another important change that augurs well for the development of industrial robots in future too is price related. On this criterion alone, there has been observed a substantial reduction in the price structure of industrial robots in the current year 2009 from that existing fifteen years ago. This has made it affordable for some small and mainly medium businesses to use industrial robots in their operations.
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