Six-axis robots – not just for industry anymore

When you think about six-axis robots, you may see the big, cold, steel robot­ic arms paint­ed blue, grey, yel­low or orange that work in man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties across the world. These robots can weld, han­dle mate­r­i­al and remove mate­r­i­al. But, did you know that now some of those same robots are tak­ing care of live animals?

A lab­o­ra­to­ry in Japan, in con­junc­tion with Motoman Robot­ics, is work­ing toward devel­op­ing a robot that can take care of test sub­jects – in this case 30,000 mice – so that the sub­jects are not com­pro­mised by human hands. These six-axis robots would not have the abil­i­ty to con­t­a­m­i­nate test results in the way human hands could. They also pro­tect work­ers from infec­tion that could be spread by bites and scrapes from the mice.

But, a non-liv­ing thing autonomous­ly car­ing for 30,000 liv­ing crea­tures? That’s only hap­pens in sci-fi movies, right? Not any­more. Accord­ing to Giz­mo­do, this six-axis robot­ic arm can mim­ic human arm motions, and can swap out end-of-arm-tool­ing to feed the mice, change the water and sheets in cages and to even move cages to and from the lab.

This six-axis robot is pro­grammed to move with a slow, con­sis­tent and gen­tle grace that will keep the mice from get­ting too rat­tled. By using these six-arm robot­ic sys­tems, lab­o­ra­to­ries can move test sub­jects around faster, with­out dam­age to the mice, and keep results from being con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed, which could lead to more suc­cess­ful testing.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor of six-axis robot­ics from Motoman, Fanuc, ABB, Uni­ver­sal Robots, and KUKA, has sev­er­al of these six-arm indus­tri­al robots in their ware­house in Mar­i­on, Ohio. These robots aren’t just for indus­tri­al use any­more. As the sto­ry reads above, these robots are now branch­ing out into oth­er areas like sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical test­ing. They’re also being used in surgery and oth­er human inter­ac­tive applications.

If you’d like to know more about how a six-axis robot can help your busi­ness, con­tact Robots​.com today online or at 877−762−6881.