The trend of collaborative robots!
In September 2017, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) released its 2017-2023 market forecast. In its main report, it highlights future trends:
Robotswhich are easier to install, program and operate will unlock entry barriers tothe large, untapped market of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Trendtowards having production closer to the end consumer driving the importance ofstandardisation & consistency across global brands.
Collaborativerobots are shifting the traditional limits of “what canbe automated?”
Collaborativerobots increase manufacturing flexibility as ‘lowvolume high mix’ becomes the new normal
Collaborationis also about productivity with increased human/robot interaction
We summarize the trend of the international federation, can be summed up in one sentence: simple to use, flexible, safe collaborative robots, will be more suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises and global enterprises and other different production needs, become the main trend of industrial robot development.
Why can the rise of collaborative robots become the trend of robot development? This topic starts with the first industrial robots. Industrial robots are often confined to physical enclosures for independent, repetitive, high-intensity work. Because these robots typically have very powerful drive systems and complex end-effectors, and are not equipped with sensors to detect workers, they are likely to cause unnecessary injury to human workers if they are not confined to enclosures. Moreover, industrial robots are usually difficult to meet the production occasions with many product types, few manufacturing batch numbers and high flexibility requirements. In small parts assembly work and small space operations, it is difficult to achieve full automation, and it is difficult to apply industrial robots in the case of flexibility. Different from traditional industrial robots, the technical characteristics of collaborative robots are mainly safety, ease of use, flexibility and integration. Security is the basis of man-machine cooperation system. Ease of use and flexibility are the key points of man-machine collaboration systems, and the ability to quickly adapt to flexible and complex production methods is the advantage of collaborative robots. Integration is the core of collaborative robots to fully penetrate the market and exceed workers in multiple directions.
1. Security
The primary guarantee of human-human interaction is personal safety, and collision detection is the prerequisite for cooperative robots to achieve any human-computer collaboration. The ISO/TS 15066 standard, published by the International Organization for Standardization in 2016, divides the safety of cooperative robots into four aspects: safety level monitoring, manual teaching, power and force limitation, speed and separation monitoring.
2. Easy to use
Compared with traditional industrial robots, collaborative robots are greatly optimized in the difficulty of getting started. In addition to programming through programming languages, they can directly drag and drop teaching. The principle of drag teaching is that with the help of the robot's dynamics model, the controller can calculate the torque required by the robot when it is dragged in real time, and then provide the torque to the motor so that the robot can assist the operator to drag well. The formula includes inertial force term, Coriolis force term, centrifugal force term, gravity term and friction term. According to the selected friction model, it can be decomposed into viscous friction term, Coulomb friction term and compensation. The calculation of friction force is a relatively complex mathematical model. Based on the implementation of the current technology, there is no sensor compensation technology; Add the external force sensor feedback optimization model calculation; Elastic device expansion model calculation, etc. Each robot company has a unique advantage in this step, which can achieve weightless drag teaching function.
3. Low cost
Compared with the deployment of traditional industrial robots, the deployment of collaborative robots is much simpler, from the safety point of view, the most intuitive is that industrial robots must be equipped with fences for security reasons, and collaborative robots do not need to; Compared from the body, the price of traditional industrial robots varies from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of thousands of machines (after all, where is the size difference), and the price of collaborative robots is relatively stable, generally can be controlled within 200,000.
In recent years, the collaborative robot industry has gradually returned to rationality, and manufacturers have focused more on product polishing and iteration, while sparing no effort in the development of downstream application scenarios. However, it needs to be admitted that the current market base of collaborative robots is still small, and in many industrial scenarios, the high flexibility of collaborative robots has not yet really played its value!
In the post-epidemic era, the pace of robot replacement for enterprise decision-makers has been accelerated, and collaborative robots have become the "big just need" for small and medium-sized factories based on the need to adapt to the current low-cost and small transformation of the original production line. Today, collaborative robots have gone through the stage of "market education" and "quality precipitation", and are moving towards the stage of "mass application"!
