According to the Robotic Industries Association, an industrial robot is an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications. The first industrial robot, manufactured by Unimate, was installed by General Motors in 1961. Thus industrial robots have been around for over four decades.
According to the International Federation of Robotics, another professional organization, a service robot is a robot which operates semi or fully autonomously to perform services useful to the well being of humans and equipment, excluding manufacturing operations.
Many industrial automation tasks like assembly tasks are repetitive and tasks like painting are dirty. Robots can sometimes easily perform these tasks. Human workers often don’t require intelligence or exercise any decision making skills. Many of these dumb tasks like vacuum cleaning or loading packages onto pallets can be executed perfectly by robots with a precision and reliability that humans may lack.
As our population ages and the number of wage earners becomes a smaller fraction of our population, it is clear that robots have to fill the void in society. Industrial, and to a greater extent, service robots have the potential to fill this void in the coming years.
A second reason for the deployment of industrial robots is the trend toward small product volumes and an increase in product variety. As the volume of products being produced decreases, hard automation becomes a more expensive proposition, and robotics is the only alternative to manual production.
No comments:
Post a Comment