Robotics Industry News, Applications and Trends

Always driven by the idea of giving manufacturers maximum flexibility in the automation of high-mix processes with a single electric gripper, Robotiq is thrilled to announce today the availability of the 2-Finger Adaptive Robot Gripper.

ICRA, which stands for International Conference on Robotics and Automation, is the largest conference of its kind in the world and although it mainly focusses on academic research, most of the big players in industrial robotics are present. It is therefore a very nice opportunity to see the innovative applications that comes out of the labs from all around the world. The theme this year is Robots and Automation: Innovation for Tomorrow's Needs. For those of you who will have the chance of being at the ICRA 2012 conference, which will be held in St. Paul (Minnesota) this week (14-18 of May), here is a list of what, in my opinion, are the "must see" events.

This is only the second year for the virtual trade show, Tech ManufactureXPO and attendance greatly surpassed last year, proving that it was well appreciated by the attendees and the industry. The speakers were excellent and provided a diverse set of topics concerning automated manufacturing.

We, at Robotiq, believe that the product should adapt itself to the customer, not the opposite. This is also true for the mechanical interface, as we adapt our Gripper faceplates to fit any robot wrist. But it is more importantly true for the communication protocol which will be used to send commands to the Gripper and receive its status. We currently support six widely used communication protocols: Ethernet/IP, TCP/IP, DeviceNet, CANopen, EtherCAT, RS-232. This flexibility makes our Grippers easy to interface without the need of a converter or other complicated gizmos. Let's take a quick look at each of them.

We will be on the road next month with the new 2-Finger Adaptive Robot Gripper and the original 3-Finger Adaptive Robot Gripper for three major trade shows: Automatica 2012, ICRA and Tech Manufacture Xpo.

Last Friday the Robotiq crew were at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec city to demonstrate their Adaptive Gripper for primary and secondary school robot enthusiasts.

In Europe (just like in North America), small and medium sized manufacturers face difficult challenges. Just as high volume productions are moved to low labor cost countries to remain competitive, these manufacturers need to figure out how to remain competitive especially with their lower volume of production. Being competitive often means lowering costs and increasing quality, which can usually be achieved with robots. However, today's robots are programmed by experts, which are only affordable if the cost can be shared over a large number of units. So, the question is, how can small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises benefit from robots which meet their specific needs: easily programmable by non-experts, flexible for use in low volume productions, safe and affordable? Well, there is a European consortium to answer that question: SME Robotics.

I recently visited the on-line virtual conference from Robotics Trends about NextGen Education & Research Robotics. During the conference mention was made of some of the present problems in the North American educational systems with students not preforming well in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects perhaps falsely believing that these subjects are too difficult. The six speakers addressed different aspects of this problem, showcasing how using robotics is a method which engages students while teaching STEM material.

This article presents an overview on how a servo-electric gripper works. The image below shows the main components of an electric gripper and how it interfaces with a robot.

During the Technishow 2012 which was recently held in the Netherlands, our partner Robomotive presented a fantastic demo of a Motoman dual arm robot performing the assembly of cart wheels. As you can see in the video below, the robot is using our Adaptive Gripper at the end of each of its arms to pick up various parts and tools used in the assembly of the wheels. I like the video because it shows in many different ways how the assembly of small volume manufacturing products could be automated using flexible tools.