Is a wireless robot right for me?

Robot­ic automa­tion has been around for years. Indus­tries all over the world have auto­mat­ed dif­fer­ent parts of their pro­duc­tion lines to free up man­pow­er and speed up pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Now, instead of just the tra­di­tion­al robots, some man­u­fac­tur­ers are mov­ing toward wire­less robots for their facilities.

So, how do you know if the move toward wire­less robot­ics is right for you?

There are many things to con­sid­er before buy­ing a wire­less robot, includ­ing the ben­e­fits and the pit­falls a wire­less robot­ic sys­tem may have.

Accord­ing to a paper from smer​o​bot​.org, cost is the first con­sid­er­a­tion to be made when buy­ing any robot, but espe­cial­ly a wire­less robot. While it may seem like a wire­less robot will run more expen­sive than a tra­di­tion­al­ly wired robot, man­u­fac­tur­ers do not have the same expens­es for wire replace­ment with a wire­less robot­ic unit. This saves them mon­ey in the long run.

Anoth­er advan­tage to going wire­less is the free­dom of mobil­i­ty that a wire­less robot has. These robots can move around a plant with­out inter­rupt­ing the con­nec­tiv­i­ty of the robot to the con­troller, the arti­cle stat­ed. Also, this free­dom is an advan­tage if robots have to be moved and repro­grammed for new prod­uct lines on a fre­quent basis.

While there are obvi­ous advan­tages to robot­ic wire­less sys­tems, there are also some pit­falls that need to be con­sid­ered before mov­ing for­ward with a pur­chase. The first, and most impor­tant, pit­fall is the wire­less robot’s threat to the safe­ty lev­el in a facil­i­ty. Wire­less robots oper­ate on receivers that are linked to their con­trollers. There are fre­quen­cies that can jam those receivers, and cause acci­dents in the shop. Man­u­fac­tur­ers have to take extra pre­cau­tions to remove these inter­fer­ences when employ­ing wire­less systems.

There can also be an issue with secu­ri­ty on a wire­less sys­tem. If the fre­quen­cy is received by an out­side source, the robot pro­gram could be hacked. Of course com­pa­nies offer­ing wire­less robots have pro­to­cols in order to pro­tect against these issues.

All in all, a wire­less robot is an invest­ment in the future. Even­tu­al­ly, all robots may end up being wire­less, just like most phones are now. It is just a mat­ter of time and money.

Robots​.com is a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor for many robot­ics com­pa­nies, includ­ing Fanuc, Motoman, ABB, Uni­ver­sal Robots, and KUKA robot­ics. If our cus­tomers are look­ing for wire­less robots, we will pro­cure them for our cus­tomers, and even cus­tomize them into a work­cell, if the cus­tomer chooses.

For more infor­ma­tion about pur­chas­ing a wire­less robot through Robots​.com, con­tact us today online or at 877−762−6881.