The final 20 years have been marked by important developments in robotic automation. More factories and manufacturing services 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 trade strikes in the direction of sensible factories and Industry 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 International Federation of Robotics (IFR) estimated that 2.7 million industrial robots are presently deployed across the globe. The IFR additionally reported that cobots have overtaken conventional robots by way of development, with cobots rising at a fee 4 occasions sooner than that of conventional robots in 2019. Separately, Emergen Research predicts that cobot gross sales will climb to USD9.3 billion by 2027, up from USD0.7bn in 2019.
This article highlights among the key traits driving the exceptional 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 High-Mix, Low Volume Production
In the previous decade, the manufacturing sector has seen a substantial shift in focus away from mass manufacturing in the direction of high-mix/low-volume (HMLV) manufacturing batches. Universal Robots helps this development in the 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 realize from adoption of cobots, The Purdue Manufacturing Extension Partnership at Purdue University discovered that cobots are greatest suited to manufacturing corporations with 50 to 500 staff and “a family product mix.” The researchers additionally discovered that cobots are match for homeowners on the lookout for a quick ROI (Universal Robots deployments sometimes lead to ROI in lower than 12 months), managers who “can’t fill shifts, but can redeploy employees to more value-added positions” and for corporations seeking to relieve employees from unergonomic and harmful jobs.
Cobots are versatile and versatile, making them ideally suited to HMLV manufacturing environments. Universal Robots cobots may be deployed on all kinds of purposes, together with meeting, dispensing, finishing, machine tending, materials dealing with, materials elimination, high quality inspection, and welding. The UR+ Ecosystem builds on this flexibility by offering a spread of software program and {hardware} elements from end-of-arm tooling to imaginative and prescient techniques, inspection and palletizing kits designed to supply producers with all of the instruments wanted to rapidly arrange a specialised automation undertaking.
Additionally, following a danger evaluation, cobots may be deployed safely subsequent to human employees with out the necessity for security cages/fences, which additional facilitates fast and straightforward deployments.