Since their inception, industrial robots have been widely used in many industrial fields, mainly because some factory working environments place too extreme demands on the human body, making them unsuitable for human labor, or because certain jobs have very high technical requirements that human manual labor cannot meet.
(1) Harsh working environment and dangerous work. Industrial robots can replace humans and be used in die casting workshops and nuclear industry, etc., where the work is harmful to health and life, or where there are many unsafe factors and it is more suitable for humans to do it, such as the automatic fuel exchanger for boiling water reactors in the nuclear industry.
(2) Special and extreme operations. Robots can be used in situations that are beyond human capabilities, such as volcano exploration, deep-sea exploration, and space exploration, such as the manipulator arm used on the space shuttle to recover satellites.
(3) In the early stages of automated production, industrial robots were mainly used for loading and unloading machine tools, spot welding, and painting. With the emergence of flexible automation, robots are playing a more important role in automated production. Examples are as follows:
1) Welding Robots. Arc welding robots require six degrees of freedom: three degrees of freedom to control the welding tool's spatial trajectory following the weld seam, and the other three degrees of freedom to maintain the correct posture relationship between the welding tool and the workpiece surface, thus ensuring good weld quality. These robots are widely used in the welding of load-bearing beams and body structures in automobile manufacturing plants.
2) Material handling robots. Material handling robots can be used for loading and unloading, palletizing, unloading, and orienting parts. 3) Inspection. In the parts manufacturing process, both engineering inspection and finished product inspection are key processes to ensure product quality. Inspection content mainly includes: confirming whether the part dimensions are within allowable tolerances; and controlling the classification of parts according to quality.
4) Assembly Robots. Assembly is a relatively complex process that requires not only detecting errors during the assembly process but also attempting to correct them. Therefore, assembly robots utilize many sensors, such as contact sensors, vision sensors, proximity sensors, and auditory sensors. Auditory sensors are used to determine whether press-in or slide-in parts are in place.
5) Painting and spraying. At least five degrees of freedom are required for three-dimensional surface painting and spraying operations. Due to the presence of flammable environments, the drive unit must be fire- and explosion-proof. When working on large parts, the robot is often mounted on a guide rail for movement.
2. Advantages of using robots
By introducing the application areas of robots, we can see that robots bring the following benefits to humanity.
(1) Reduce labor costs.
(2) Improve productivity.
(3) Improve product quality.
(4) Increase the flexibility of the manufacturing process.
(5) Reduce material waste.
(6) Control and accelerate inventory turnover.
(7) Reduce production costs
(8) Eliminate dangerous and harsh working conditions.
