Robots

Robot types

This is a SCARA (Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm) robot and is the most common industrial robot used, it is manufactured by America’s biggest robotics manufacturer, Adept. It is has three joints which allow for three axial planes of movement. It’s best used for a ‘Pick-up and place’ function, where you are simply moving something from location A to location B

REF (Photo and information sourced from) - http://www.learnaboutrobots.com/industrial.htm

This particular robot is called a Fanuc robot, is has six pivot joints and thus six degrees of freedom. It can move in the x, y and z whilst also using the remaining three to orientate the object it has picked up. These three axis are called roll, pitch and yaw. The most common utilisation of these robots is to exploit their freedom of movement by doing such work as painting or welding; hazardous processes that need a human range of movement but without the worry about risking a human employee.

Ref (Photo and information sourced from)- http://www.learnaboutrobots.com/industrial.htm

Advantages of robotics
· You can use robotics where you wouldn’t want to place a human, such as in welding processes or painting.
· Robots can work hours on end with no break or stop, this increases productivity.
· Robots can be faster than humans and make less errors as they don’t lose their concentration.

Disadvantages of robotics
· If an error occurs, such as the paint being applied is the wrong colour for example, the robot will not know and so will carry on as it is. Unless a safety switch is pressed, or a specific sensor is set and used to prevent and warn the robot, it will not stop it’s workings until a human notices and stops the production line.
· Robots need regular calibration, maintenance and repair. This can only be done by a trained human specialist and can be expensive.
· Robots in themselves are expensive to purchase in the first place.
· When being set up with a new process they need to be set by a trained specialist. This involves writing the programme and setting up all the axial offsets, this takes time and again the expense of a specialist.
· Quality Engineering will need to focus on batch testing the output from the robots to ensure that the offsets haven’t moved and all work output is up to specification.

Automatic functioning of a robot - The safety aspect
Having fully automatic robots can be very advantageous but it also has its drawbacks. The robot will work for long lengths of time without needing to be checked but when robots go wrong, they can sometimes become dangerous.

For safety reasons robots are generally setup with dozens of sensors to alert the user and the robot that is has either moved out of its range or done something, it shouldn’t have. If the robot has just been programmed or a robot component fails, there is a high risk it will damage something, be it a component or another robot, before anyone can do anything to stop it. In cases where the robot is completing a process such as welding, if the robot were to get out of control, it could be very dangerous to anyone or anything in the general vicinity.

With adequate sensor and safety switch technology along with the use of guarding, the robot will be as safe as it can be, but it would still need to be monitored at timely intervals, be it by viewing it directly, monitoring it through the output results in quality engineering or from a control panel, where one human can monitor various robots at the same time.

Posted by Sophie Latham