Collaborative robots are widely used across various industries, assisting people in performing tasks such as welding, handling, polishing, painting, and stamping. This article deconstructs the structure and operating principles of collaborative robots.
Collaborative robot structure
Robots can be divided into two parts: hardware and software. The hardware part mainly includes the body and the controller, while the software part mainly refers to its control technology.
hardware components
Let's start with the robot's body. Industrial robots are designed to mimic the human hand. We'll build upon that. The UR3e general-purpose robot (hereinafter referred to as "UR robot"), taking the collaborative table robot as an example, mainly consists of six parts: base, lower frame, upper frame, arm, wrist body, wrist attachment, etc.
Each robot joint is controlled by a servo motor and a reducer, much like human muscles. The servo motor is a power source; the robot's speed and load capacity are connected to the servo motor. The reducer is a power transmission element and comes in many different sizes. Generally, microbeads offer high repeatability, typically less than 0.001 inches or 0.0254 millimeters. The connection between the servo motor and the reducer helps improve the reducer's accuracy and transmission ratio.
The robot controller is like the robot's brain, participating in the entire process of calculation, sending instructions, and power supply. It guides the robot to perform certain operations or tasks based on instructions and sensor information, and is a major factor in the robot's functionality and performance.
software
Then there's the robot software—control technology refers to the application areas of robots that work quickly and accurately. A major advantage of our robots is that their programs can be easily modified, allowing operators without programming experience to quickly set them up and operate them. Thanks to the intuitive manual and user interface, operators can directly move the robotic arm along its path or work on a tablet to generate programming code.
Besides its simplicity, our robot is also highly flexible. In addition to six degrees of freedom, the operator can adapt to different scenarios. The wrist tool's I/O connectors and high-speed communication cables facilitate seamless connection to other collaborative robots, making it easy and convenient. Furthermore, machine vision and the recent in-depth research and classification of artificial intelligence fall under the category of control technology.
