The era for industrial robots

Everybody knows that the robotic automation came first of all from automotive. It is reasonable – lots of welding operations, mass product, necessity of high speeds and repeatability, so everything to start the great robot integration. Automotive is the biggest, richest and the most lovely customer for any robots manufacturer and usually all their “key” or “gold” customers are automotive factories.

Next things are hazard, hot and danger environments. Why to use human and to pay great additional costs for hard work if it is much better to replace the job with the robot? For this reason robots came to all the hard environment technologies: forging equipment, foundries and steel mills automation, work with big concentration of gases, dusts etc. This is the great replacement which makes the cut of human work in hazard operations on the factory and realizes non-stop 24 hours production.

After that robots came to all operations which require repeatability, mass production and clear cycle – the general industrial automation. But anyway even if the modern robotic arm could be programmed to give you the glass of beer, write or play piano we can’t forget the main purposes of robots: welding and loading-unloading operations. There are much more industrial solutions, for example even milling with robot but the first two are the most used and the general one.

But there is too much information about robots so we do not want to talk about general things. The one phrase of this note is – “today is the new era of industrial robots”. Why? Robots made a great jump to come from the special welding lines and transfer systems for automotive with budgets for dozens of millions Euro to the position that even small workshop can came to the robot use. Do you know what the start of the price is when you can think about purchasing of robot? If you will go to used machine tools market you can see the offers with the start price of ten thousand Euros for working and not the ancient robot arm. Yes, it is not the final investments – you need a lot of things in addition: to realize the application, to buy or to manufacture the clamps or holders for your operation, to make programming, probably to buy the other software package, to buy safety devices etc. etc. But you can’t think that the robots automation is something incredible expensive and for this reason – untouchable for small manufacturers. For sure prices for new robots much higher, the complete system from the manufacturer or robots integrator could be valued with the several hundred thousand Euros, but…

Production of robots for the market is really massive, modernization of big factories makes possibilities for replacements of hundred robots for the big lines and the availability of them on the used machines market, manufacturers try to reduce prices to be competitive etc. Robotic arm last years is not something futuristic from the future but the standard industrial tool like any other CNC machine. Great possibilities and functions together with the risen human salaries make robots the great investment; moreover for robot instead of the machine tool you can change the function and application. And moreover the price possibilities on the used market can help to the small companies also to touch the advantages of the great automation generation.

photo credit: jurvetson FANUC Robot Assembly Demo via photopin (license)