Flexible production and industrial robots

The dawn of industrial robots
industrial robot device
Let's go back to the recent past and remember how the history of the creation of industrial automatic machines began. The first robots appeared in the USA in 1962, and they were produced by Union Incorporated and Versatran. Although, to be precise, they nevertheless released the Unimate industrial robot, created by the American engineer D. Devol, who patented his own self-propelled guns programmed using punched cards. It was an obvious technical breakthrough: "smart" machines remembered the coordinates of the waypoints on their route and performed the work according to the program.
Unimate's first industrial robot was equipped with a pneumatically actuated two-finger gripper and a five degree of freedom hydraulically actuated arm. Its characteristics made it possible to move a 12 kg part with an accuracy of 1.25 mm.
Another Versatran robotic arm, made by the company of the same name, loaded and unloaded 1,200 bricks per hour into a kiln. He successfully replaced the work of people in an environment harmful to their he alth with a high temperature. The idea of its creation turned out to be very successful, and the design is so reliable that some machines of this brand continue to work in our time. And this despite the fact that their resource exceeded hundreds of thousands of hours.
Note that the first generation of industrial robots inin terms of value, it assumed 75% mechanics and 25% electronics. The readjustment of such devices required time and caused equipment downtime. To repurpose them to perform new work, the control program was replaced.
Second generation robot machines
It soon became clear: despite all the advantages, the machines of the first generation turned out to be imperfect … The second generation assumed more subtle control of industrial robots - adaptive. The very first devices required ordering the environment in which they worked. The latter circumstance often meant high additional costs. This was becoming critical for the development of mass production.
The new stage of progress was characterized by the development of many sensors. With their help, the robot received a quality called "feeling". He began to receive information about the external environment and, in accordance with it, choose the best course of action. For example, he acquired skills that allow him to take a part and bypass an obstacle with it. This action occurs due to the microprocessor processing of the received information, which further, entered into the variables of the control programs, is actually guided by the robots.
Types of basic production operations (welding, painting, assembly, various kinds of machining) are also subject to adaptation. That is, when performing each of them, multivariance is initiated to improve the quality of any kind of the above works.
Industrial manipulators are mainly controlled by software. Control hardwarefunctions are industrial mini-computers PC/104 or MicroPC. Note that adaptive control is based on multivariant software. Moreover, the decision on the choice of the type of program operation is made by the robot based on information about the environment described by the detectors.
A characteristic feature of the functioning of the second generation robot is the preliminary presence of established modes of operation, each of which is activated at certain indicators obtained from the external environment.