Collaborative robots are a popular sub industry of robotics in recent years. Collaborative robots are a type of robot that can safely interact/interact directly with humans, expanding the "human" attribute of robot functions and possessing certain autonomous behavior and collaborative abilities. It can be said that collaborative robots are the most tacit partners of humans. In unstructured environments, collaborative robots can cooperate with humans, Complete designated tasks safely.
Collaborative robots have ease of use, flexibility, and safety. Among them, usability is a necessary condition for the rapid development of collaborative robots in recent years, flexibility is a necessary prerequisite for the widespread application of collaborative robots by humans, and safety is the basic guarantee for the safe work of collaborative robots. These three main characteristics determine the important position of collaborative robots in the field of industrial robotics, and their application scenarios are broader than traditional industrial robots.
At present, no less than 30 domestic and foreign robot manufacturers have launched collaborative robot products and introduced collaborative robots into production lines to complete precision assembly, testing, product packaging, polishing, machine tool loading and unloading, and other work. Below is a brief introduction to the top ten application scenarios of collaborative robots.
1. Packaging stacking
Packaging palletizing is one of the applications of collaborative robots. In traditional industry, dismantling and palletizing is a highly repetitive labor. The use of collaborative robots can replace manual alternation in unpacking and palletizing packaging boxes, which is beneficial for improving the orderliness and production efficiency of item stacking. The robot first unpacks the packaging boxes from the pallet and places them on the conveyor line. After the boxes reach the end of the conveyor line, the robot sucks the boxes and stacks them onto another pallet.
2. Polishing
The end of the collaborative robot is equipped with a force control technology and a retractable intelligent floating polishing head, which is maintained at a constant force through a pneumatic device for surface polishing. This application can be used to polish various types of rough parts in the manufacturing industry. According to the requirements of the process, the surface roughness of the work piece can be roughly or precisely polished. It can also maintain a constant polishing speed and change the polishing trajectory in real time according to the size of the contact force on the polishing surface, making the polishing trajectory suitable for the curvature of the work piece surface and effectively controlling the amount of material removed.
3. Drag Teaching
Operators can manually pull the collaborative robot to reach a specified pose or move along a specific trajectory, while recording the pose data during the teaching process, in an intuitive way to teach the robot application tasks. This can greatly shorten the programming efficiency of the collaborative robot in the application deployment phase, reduce the requirements for operators, and achieve the goal of cost reduction and efficiency increase.
4. Gluing and dispensing
Collaborative robots replace human work in gluing, which involves a large amount of work and is finely crafted with good quality. He automatically dispenses glue according to the program, completes the planning path, and can control the amount of glue dispensed according to the set requirements to ensure uniform dispensing. It is widely used in various scenarios that require glue application, such as the automotive parts industry and 3C electronics industry.
5. Gear assembly
Collaborative robot force control assembly technology can be practically applied to the assembly of gears in automotive transmissions. During the assembly process, the position of the gears in the feeding area is first perceived by the visual system, and then the gears are grabbed and assembled. During the assembly process, the degree of fit between the gears is sensed through a force sensor. When no force is detected between the gears, the gears are accurately placed in a fixed position to complete the assembly of the planetary gears.
6. System welding
In the current market, excellent manual welders have become very scarce, and replacing manual welding with collaborative robot welding is a priority choice for many factories. Based on the flexible trajectory characteristics of collaborative robot robotic arms, adjust the swing arm amplitude and accuracy, and use a cleaning and cutting system to eliminate welding gun blockage and reduce the consumption and time consumption in manual operation processes. The collaborative robot welding system has high accuracy and repeatability, making it suitable for long-term production processes and ensuring consistency in product quality. The programming operation of the welding system is very easy to get started with, even inexperienced personnel can complete the programming of the welding system within half an hour. At the same time, the program can be saved and reused, greatly reducing the training cost for new employees.
7. Screw lock
In labor-intensive assembly applications, collaborative robots achieve precise screw locking through precise positioning and recognition, with strong production flexibility and advantages. They replace human hands to complete automatic devices for screw retrieval, placement, and tightening, and can meet the needs of intelligent locking processes in enterprises.
8. Quality inspection
Using collaborative robots for testing can achieve high-quality testing and more accurate production batches. By conducting quality inspection on parts, including comprehensive inspection of finished parts, high-resolution image inspection of precision machined parts, and comparison and confirmation between parts and CAD models, the quality inspection process can be automated to quickly obtain inspection results.
9. Equipment care
Using a collaborative robot can maintain multiple machines. Nursing collaborative robots require I/O docking hardware specific to specific devices, which prompts the robot when to enter the next production cycle or when to supplement materials, freeing up labor and improving production efficiency.
In addition to the above, collaborative robots are also applied in other non manufacturing and non-traditional fields such as processing operations, medical and surgical procedures, warehousing and logistics, and machine maintenance. With the development and maturity of artificial intelligence, collaborative robots will become increasingly intelligent and take on more job responsibilities in multiple fields, becoming important assistants for humans.
Post time: Dec-16-2023
