Current Trends In Industrial Robots

The con­tin­ued advance­ment of new tech­nol­o­gy inun­dates fac­to­ry robots with a con­stant influx of trends. It is now nec­es­sary to stay on top of the trends to keep your pro­duc­tion line glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive. Man­u­fac­tur­ers can expect to see the fol­low­ing trends on the rise.

1. Indus­tri­al Inter­net of Things (IIoT): The ​“Indus­tri­al Inter­net of Things” is lead­ing to even new­er lev­els of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, pre­ci­sion, flex­i­bil­i­ty, and effi­cien­cy on the pro­duc­tion line. It is cre­at­ing ways to inte­grate the phys­i­cal world into our com­put­er-based sys­tems, pro­vid­ing improved effi­cien­cy, accu­ra­cy, and eco­nom­ic benefit. 

The IIoT will tie every­thing togeth­er through advanced sen­sors and net­work­ing while pro­duc­ing capa­bil­i­ties to cap­ture, share, and act on real-time data that is con­stant­ly being gen­er­at­ed and imme­di­ate­ly avail­able. This com­bined with the addi­tion­al options of A.I. and cog­ni­tive com­put­ing on the rise will pro­duce an incred­i­bly effi­cient automa­tion sys­tem for the future.

2. Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty: Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty threats for automa­tion sys­tems go beyond data breach­es and pro­duc­tion delays, it can also raise some seri­ous safe­ty con­cerns. Indus­tri­al robots are pow­er­ful and deter­mined crea­tures so ensur­ing they stay on their spe­cif­ic mis­sion at all times is imperative.

With the advanc­ing soft­ware and con­nect­ed data net­work, address­ing cyber­se­cu­ri­ty soon­er rather than lat­er will stay on top of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to con­tin­ue safe and reli­able production.

With the con­ver­gence of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy (IT) and oper­a­tional tech­nol­o­gy (OT), cyber­se­cu­ri­ty is no longer ​“some­body else’s prob­lem.” In this age of the Indus­tri­al Inter­net of Things (IIoT), cyber­se­cu­ri­ty is everyone’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. Threats can pen­e­trate all the way to the shop floor.

3. Big Data Analy­sis: As more things con­tin­ue to jump online, it is impor­tant to find ways to orga­nize and ana­lyze all of the infor­ma­tion avail­able. Big data is ana­lyzed com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly reveal­ing pat­terns, trends, and asso­ci­a­tions. Mak­ing sense of the data and link­ing it to the phys­i­cal actions helps to pro­vide bet­ter floor opti­miza­tion techniques. 

4. Vir­tu­al Solu­tions: This helps to pro­vide a vir­tu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of robot­ic sys­tems for proof con­cepts. Offline pro­gram­ming cre­ates a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the entire work space, includ­ing all of the robots and machines con­nect­ed to it. This helps allow for the pro­gram­ming of robots out­side of the pro­duc­tion with­out any stop­page; ulti­mate­ly reduc­ing down­time from at least ¹⁄₁₀ or from 40 hours to less than 4 hours. 

5. Col­lab­o­ra­tive robots: Many robot­ics man­u­fac­tur­ers, includ­ing Fanuc, KUKA, Motoman, Uni­ver­sal Robots, and ABB, are tak­ing advan­tage of new tech­nolo­gies that enable humans and robots to col­lab­o­rate, doing away with the safe­ty bar­ri­ers. Col­lab­o­ra­tive robots (cobots) have been designed with mul­ti­ple advanced sen­sors, soft­ware, and EOATs that help them swift­ly and eas­i­ly detect and adapt to any sort of intru­sion into its work enve­lope. This helps to improve the over­all appli­ca­tion func­tion­al­i­ty, while also decreas­ing the amount of space nec­es­sary for a robot­ic unit. 

You can expect to see these trends bring­ing some of the most impact­ful advances in robot­ic automa­tion. Indus­tri­al robots have become com­mon­place on pro­duc­tion lines, bring­ing a con­sis­tent increase in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and prof­itabil­i­ty and con­tin­u­ing to change the way we man­u­fac­ture. Automa­tion sys­tems have been a rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nol­o­gy that will con­tin­ue to trans­form the industry. 

For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact Robots​.com experts online or at 877−762−6881.