Industrial robot types and how they help you save costs

There are five or six types of industrial robots available, depending on the nature of classification. Cartesian robots have arms with three prismatic joints and axes correlated with a cartesian coordinate system. These are ideal for applications like pick and place, material handling, loading, unloading, packaging automation, etc.

A SCARA robot provides compliance in a plane with two parallel rotary joints. These robots are a popular option for assembly applications. Articulated Robot has an arm with a minimum of three rotary joints. Another type is the Parallel/Delta robot with either concurrent prismatic or rotary joints and is typically used for quick pick and place applications.

Cylindrical robots are those whose axes form a cylindrical coordinate system and are often used for welding, assembling, cleaning, dispensing, and processing applications. Finally, COBOTS are those robots that work alongside humans.

How Industrial robots save costs

Customers want to automate to improve productivity and reliability at the right price while maintaining quality and reducing the waste

generated. This equates to producing things more quickly, flexibly, closer to consumers, and at a reasonable cost, with minimal wastage and maximum consistency.

"For SMEs, controlling costs and enhanced productivity are the two main growth drivers that help them create jobs and progress," Subrata Karmakar, President of Robotics and Discrete Automation at ABB India. “Automation can help a business reduce costs by improving quality and reducing wastage through enhanced repeatability or innovations like the 3DQI quality inspection system.” 

The cost of unplanned downtime is becoming more critical due to shorter product life cycles, so automation and digital tools that help customers keep plants online and improve production line efficiency and performance are becoming more acute. Digital tools that enable production teams to know exactly what is happening in their production line help optimize processes and efficiencies to make products more cost-effective.

Affordability contributing to more adoption

Robots prices have become more affordable in recent years because of the high degree of adoption, which, to robotics manufacturers, means producing robots in volume.

"When employing robots, manufactures have been having a concerted benefit in the form of enhanced quality of output (owing to less manual intervention), less wastage (because of improved precision), better throughput due to enhanced speed & efficiency, space optimization (in most of the cases) and addition of value to the safety in the work environment by taking over hazardous tasks," explained Swaminathan Ramamurthy, GM of OMRON Automation Centre & Robotics at OMRON Asia Pacific. "With these tangible and intangible benefits, manufacturers can realize an ROI that makes business sense."

Bottomline

That robots help manufacturing customers save costs is nothing new. The question is whether the savings are worth the capital investments. While this would depend on the size of the business and the number of required solutions, increasing the robots' affordability is a positive sign. As technology advances and solutions become even less expensive, we may see more customers adopting industrial robots.