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The ISO 8373:1994 standard Manipulating Industrial Robots - Vocabulary defines an industrial robot as an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes. In a simple phrase, industrial robotics refers to the study, design and use of robots for manufacturing. Typical applications of industrial robots include welding, painting, ironing, assembly, palletizing, product inspection, and testing.
There are a small number of commonly used robot configurations for industrial automation, including articulated robots (the original, and most common), SCARA robots and gantry robots (aka Cartesian robots, or x-y-z robots). In the context of general robotics, most types of industrial robots would fall into the category of robot arms (inherent in the use of the word manipulator in the above-mentioned ISO standard).
Industrial robots exhibit varying degrees of autonomy. Some models faithfully do exactly what they were programmed to do over and over again without variation. These actions are determined by programmed routines that specify the direction, speed, and distance of a series of coordinated motions. Other industrial robots are much more flexible as to the orientation of the object on which they are operating or even the task that has to be performed on the object itself, which the robot may even need to identify. For example, for more precise guidance, robots often contain machine vision sub-systems acting as their "eyes", linked to powerful computers. Artificial intelligence, or what passes for it, is becoming an increasingly important factor in the modern industrial robot.
The setup or programming of motions and sequences for an industrial robot is sometimes taught by an operator using a teaching pendant, a handheld control and programming unit.
Manufacturers of industrial robots include: Epson Robots, Yaskawa, ABB, KUKA and FANUC
The first company to produce an industrial robot was Unimation, founded by Joseph F. Engelberger in 1962, with the basic inventions of George Devol. Unimation robots were also called programmable transfer machines since their main use at first was to transfer objects from one point to another, less than a dozen feet or so apart.
For some time their only competitor was Cincinnati Milacron Inc. of Ohio. This changed radically in the 1970s when several big Japanese conglomerates began producing similar industrial robots. Unimation had obtained patents in The United States but not in Japan, so their designs were copied and then improved upon in that country. Eventually the deeper long term financial resources of the Japanese companies prevailed, their robots spread all over the globe and Unimation Inc. disappeared completely. Only the Swedish-Swiss company ABB (ASEA Brown-Boveri) managed to survive in this market otherwise dominated by huge Japanese companies.
History of Industrial Robotics
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A comprehensive reference on the categories and applications of industrial robotics. 1378 pages.
