Industrial robot

[1] Typical applications of robots include welding, painting, assembly, disassembly,[2] pick and place for printed circuit boards, packaging and labeling, palletizing, product inspection, and testing; all accomplished with high endurance, speed, and precision.

The first autonomous robots environment were known as Elmer and Elsie, which were constructed in the late 1940s by W. Grey Walter.

To be able to move and orient the effector organ in all directions, such a robot needs 6 axes (or degrees of freedom).

The compact effector design allows the robot to reach tight work-spaces without any loss of speed.

serial manipulators are very common industrial robots; they are designed as a series of links connected by motor-actuated joints that extend from a base to an end-effector.

For example, the 3 DoF Delta robot has lower 3T mobility and has proven to be very successful for rapid pick-and-place translational positioning applications.

[12] The debilitating effects of concomitant motion should be mitigated or eliminated in the successful design of lower mobility manipulators.

These actions are determined by programmed routines that specify the direction, acceleration, velocity, deceleration, and distance of a series of coordinated motions Other robots are much more flexible as to the orientation of the object on which they are operating or even the task that has to be performed on the object itself, which the robot may even need to identify.

For example, for more precise guidance, robots often contain machine vision sub-systems acting as their visual sensors, linked to powerful computers or controllers.

The earliest known industrial robot, conforming to the ISO definition was completed by "Bill" Griffith P. Taylor in 1937 and published in Meccano Magazine, March 1938.

[14][15] The crane-like device was built almost entirely using Meccano parts, and powered by a single electric motor.

Automation was achieved using punched paper tape to energise solenoids, which would facilitate the movement of the crane's control levers.

They were accurate to within 1/10,000 of an inch[16] (note: although accuracy is not an appropriate measure for robots, usually evaluated in terms of repeatability - see later).

This changed radically in the late 1970s when several big Japanese conglomerates began producing similar industrial robots.

This allowed it accurately to follow arbitrary paths in space and widened the potential use of the robot to more sophisticated applications such as assembly and welding.

The first two IRB 6 robots were sold to Magnusson in Sweden for grinding and polishing pipe bends and were installed in production in January 1974.

U.S. startup companies included Automatix and Adept Technology, Inc. At the height of the robot boom in 1984, Unimation was acquired by Westinghouse Electric Corporation for 107 million U.S. dollars.

Offline programming is where the entire cell, the robot and all the machines or instruments in the workspace are mapped graphically.

It can also increase the level of safety associated with robotic equipment since various "what if" scenarios can be tried and tested before the system is activated.

However a computer is often used to 'supervise' the robot and any peripherals, or to provide additional storage for access to numerous complex paths and routines.

Common examples of end effectors include welding devices (such as MIG-welding guns, spot-welders, etc.

), spray guns and also grinding and deburring devices (such as pneumatic disk or belt grinders, burrs, etc.

The most common and most convenient way of defining a point is to specify a Cartesian coordinate for it, i.e. the position of the 'end effector' in mm in the X, Y and Z directions relative to the robot's origin.

Most articulated robots perform by storing a series of positions in memory, and moving to them at various times in their programming sequence.

The result of a singularity can be quite dramatic and can have adverse effects on the robot arm, the end effector, and the process.

The ANSI/RIA has mandated that robot manufacturers shall make the user aware of singularities if they occur while the system is being manually manipulated.

The third and last type of singularity in wrist-partitioned vertically articulated six-axis robots occurs when the wrist's center lies in the same plane as axes 2 and 3.

Singularities are closely related to the phenomena of gimbal lock, which has a similar root cause of axes becoming lined up.

[4] On October 5, 2017, OSHA, NIOSH and RIA signed an alliance to work together to enhance technical expertise, identify and help address potential workplace hazards associated with traditional industrial robots and the emerging technology of human-robot collaboration installations and systems, and help identify needed research to reduce workplace hazards.

So far, the research needs identified by NIOSH and its partners include: tracking and preventing injuries and fatalities, intervention and dissemination strategies to promote safe machine control and maintenance procedures, and on translating effective evidence-based interventions into workplace practice.