The final twenty years have been marked by important developments in robotic automation. Extra factories and manufacturing amenities than ever earlier than depend on robots to assist help and relieve human employees from tedious and harmful duties, guarantee product high quality and enhance total productiveness. As business strikes in direction of sensible factories and Business 4.0, how robots are utilized in manufacturing is altering, with progress being marked by the emergence of collaborative robots (or ‘cobots’), the rising use of synthetic intelligence (AI) in industrial settings, and developments in imaginative and prescient and sensor applied sciences.
In 2020, the Worldwide Federation of Robotics (IFR) estimated that 2.7 million industrial robots are at present deployed across the globe. The IFR additionally reported that cobots have overtaken conventional robots by way of progress, with cobots rising at a price 4 instances sooner than that of conventional robots in 2019. Individually, Emergen Analysis predicts that cobot gross sales will climb to USD9.3 billion by 2027, up from USD0.7bn in 2019.
This text highlights among the key traits driving the outstanding enhance in adoption of cobots in industrial and manufacturing settings, from labor shortages and the rise of high-mix, low-volume manufacturing to the convenience of use and low value of entry related to cobot applied sciences. Let’s get began!
How Industrial Robotic Automation Leverages Excessive-Combine, Low Quantity Manufacturing
Up to now decade, the manufacturing sector has seen a substantial shift in focus away from mass manufacturing in direction of high-mix/low-volume (HMLV) manufacturing batches. Common Robots helps this development in direction of custom-made manufacturing by offering producers with versatile collaborative robots which can be simple to program, making it simple to accommodate quick manufacturing runs.
In a current examine designed to establish producers which have probably the most to achieve from adoption of cobots, The Purdue Manufacturing Extension Partnership at Purdue College discovered that cobots are finest suited to manufacturing firms with 50 to 500 workers and “a household product combine.” The researchers additionally discovered that cobots are match for homeowners on the lookout for a quick ROI (Common Robots deployments sometimes end in ROI in lower than 12 months), managers who “can’t fill shifts, however can redeploy workers to extra value-added positions” and for firms trying to relieve employees from unergonomic and harmful jobs.
Cobots are versatile and versatile, making them ideally suited to HMLV manufacturing environments. Common Robots cobots could be deployed on all kinds of functions, together with meeting, dishing out, ending, machine tending, materials dealing with, materials elimination, high quality inspection, and welding. The UR+ Ecosystem builds on this flexibility by offering a variety of software program and {hardware} elements from end-of-arm tooling to imaginative and prescient methods, inspection and palletizing kits designed to supply producers with all of the instruments wanted to shortly arrange a specialised automation challenge.
Moreover, following a threat evaluation, cobots could be deployed safely subsequent to human employees with out the necessity for security cages/fences, which additional facilitates fast and straightforward deployments.
