Applications and Requirements for Industrial Robotics

Abstract

The industrial robot is more important at present as a symbol of flexible automation rather than for its economic contribution. The convenience of the robot as a symbol is that populations in each country can be counted. The populations I shall present use the first definition given in Table 1, that of the British Robot Association. An important point to remember is that the total sales value of robots is still only around 2% that of machine tool sales in the USA. An article in Business Week noted that robotics is, so far, a business of comparable size to the archery equipment industry! Its potential will only be realised when robotics departs from the classic concept of a 5 or 6-degree of freedom manipulator arm and merges, as it certainly will, to become outwardly indistinguishable from many other types of production machinery. At that stage it will be more appropriate to use a definition more like the last one in the Table and the simplistic method of counting robot populations will no longer work.