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Robot welding
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Robot welding is the use of mechanized programmable tools, which completely automate a welding process by both performing the weld and handling the part. Processes such as gas metal arc welding, while often automated, are not necessarily equivalent to robot welding, robot welding is commonly used for resistance spot welding and arc welding in high production applications, such as the automotive industry. Robot welding is a new application of robotics, even though robots were first introduced into US industry during the 1960s. The use of robots in welding did not take off until the 1980s, since then, both the number of robots used in industry and the number of their applications has grown greatly. In 2005, more than 120,000 robots were in use in North American industry, growth is primarily limited by high equipment costs, and the resulting restriction to high-production applications. Robot arc welding has begun growing quickly just recently, and already it commands about 20% of industrial robot applications, the major components of arc welding robots are the manipulator or the mechanical unit and the controller, which acts as the robots brain. The robot may weld a pre-programmed position, be guided by machine vision, weld quality assurance FANUC KUKA Robotic welding video FANUC welding robots FANUC arc welding robots FANUC spot welding robots Robotic Friction Stir Welding video
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Robot
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A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. Robots can be guided by a control device or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed to take on human form but most robots are designed to perform a task with no regard to how they look. By mimicking a lifelike appearance or automating movements, a robot may convey a sense of intelligence or thought of its own. These technologies deal with automated machines that can take the place of humans in dangerous environments or manufacturing processes, or resemble humans in appearance, many of todays robots are inspired by nature contributing to the field of bio-inspired robotics. These robots have also created a branch of robotics, soft robotics. From the time of ancient civilization there have many accounts of user-configurable automated devices and even automata resembling animals and humans. As mechanical techniques developed through the Industrial age, there appeared more practical applications such as automated machines, remote-control and wireless remote-control. The word robot was first used to denote a fictional humanoid in a 1920 play R. U. R. by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek but it was Karels brother Josef Čapek who was the words true inventor. Electronics evolved into the force of development with the advent of the first electronic autonomous robots created by William Grey Walter in Bristol. The first digital and programmable robot was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was named the Unimate, there are concerns about the increasing use of robots and their role in society. Robots are blamed for rising unemployment as they replace workers in increasing numbers of functions, the use of robots in military combat raises ethical concerns. The possibilities of robot autonomy and potential repercussions have been addressed in fiction, the word robot can refer to both physical robots and virtual software agents, but the latter are usually referred to as bots. Closely related to the concept of a robot is the field of Synthetic Biology, the idea of automata originates in the mythologies of many cultures around the world. Engineers and inventors from ancient civilizations, including Ancient China, Ancient Greece, since circa 400 BC, myths of Crete include Talos, a man of bronze who guarded the Cretan island of Europa from pirates. In ancient Greece, the Greek engineer Ctesibius applied a knowledge of pneumatics and hydraulics to produce the first organ, in the 4th century BC, the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum postulated a mechanical steam-operated bird he called The Pigeon. Hero of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician and inventor, created numerous user-configurable automated devices, the 11th century Lokapannatti tells of how the Buddhas relics were protected by mechanical robots, from the kingdom of Roma visaya, until they were disarmed by King Ashoka. Yan Shi proudly presented the king with a life-size, human-shaped figure of his mechanical handiwork made of leather, wood, in 1066, the Chinese inventor Su Song built a water clock in the form of a tower which featured mechanical figurines which chimed the hours
3.
Coupling
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A coupling is a device used to connect two shafts together at their ends for the purpose of transmitting power. Couplings do not normally allow disconnection of shafts during operation, however there are torque limiting couplings which can slip or disconnect when some torque limit is exceeded. The primary purpose of couplings is to two pieces of rotating equipment while permitting some degree of misalignment or end movement or both. By careful selection, installation and maintenance of couplings, substantial savings can be made in reduced maintenance costs, shaft couplings are used in machinery for several purposes. The most common of which are the following, to transfer power from one end to another end. To provide for the connection of shafts of units that are manufactured separately such as a motor and generator, to provide for misalignment of the shafts or to introduce mechanical flexibility. To reduce the transmission of shock loads from one shaft to another, to alter the vibration characteristics of rotating units. To connect driving and the driven part slips when overload occurs Clamped or compression rigid couplings come in two parts and fit together around the shafts to form a sleeve and they offer more flexibility than sleeved models, and can be used on shafts that are fixed in place. They consist of short sleeves surrounded by a perpendicular flange, one coupling is placed on each shaft so the two flanges line up face to face. A series of screws or bolts can then be installed in the flanges to hold them together, because of their size and durability, flanged units can be used to bring shafts into alignment before they are joined together. Rigid couplings are used when precise shaft alignment is required, shaft misalignment will affect the performance as well as its life. Examples, A sleeve coupling consists of a pipe whose bore is finished to the required tolerance based on the shaft size, based on the usage of the coupling a keyway is made in the bore in order to transmit the torque by means of the key. Two threaded holes are provided in order to lock the coupling in position, sleeve couplings are also known as Box Couplings. In this case shaft ends are coupled together and abutted against each other which are enveloped by muff or sleeve, a gib head sunk keys hold the two shafts and sleeve together. In other words, this is the simplest type of the coupling and it is made from the cast iron and very simple to design and manufacture. It consists of a pipe whose inner diameter is same as diameter of the shafts. The hollow pipe is fitted over a two or more ends of the shafts with the help of the taper sunk key. a key and sleeve are useful to transmit power from one shaft to another shaft. In this coupling, the muff or sleeve is made into two parts of the cast iron and they are joined together by means of mild steel studs or bolts
4.
Legged robot
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Legged robots are a type of mobile robot. They are somewhat a recent innovation in robotics, however, many or all bipedal models are not practical because they are cumbersome and slow. Most successful legged robots have four or six legs for further stability and this legs-over-wheels approach lends itself for use in all-terrain purposes because legs are more effective in an uneven environment than wheels. Leg mechanism Boston Dynamics Humanoid robot Klann linkage Jansens linkage Robot locomotion Walker Mecha Whegs
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Industrial robot
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An industrial robot is a robot system used for manufacturing. Industrial robots are automated, programmable and capable of movement on two or more axes and they can help in material handling and provide interfaces. The most commonly used robot configurations are articulated robots, SCARA robots, delta robots, in the context of general robotics, most types of robots would fall into the category of robotic arms. Robots exhibit varying degrees of autonomy, Some robots are programmed to carry out specific actions over and over again without variation. These actions are determined by programmed routines that specify the direction, acceleration, velocity, deceleration, for example, for more precise guidance, robots often contain machine vision sub-systems acting as their visual sensors, linked to powerful computers or controllers. Artificial intelligence, or what passes for it, is becoming an important factor in the modern industrial robot. The earliest known industrial robot, conforming to the ISO definition was completed by Bill Griffith P. Taylor in 1937 and published in Meccano Magazine, the crane-like device was built almost entirely using Meccano parts, and powered by a single electric motor. Five axes of movement were possible, including grab and grab rotation, Automation was achieved using punched paper tape to energise solenoids, which would facilitate the movement of the cranes control levers. The robot could stack wooden blocks in pre-programmed patterns, the number of motor revolutions required for each desired movement was first plotted on graph paper. This information was transferred to the paper tape, which was also driven by the robots single motor. Chris Shute built a replica of the robot in 1997. George Devol applied for the first robotics patents in 1954, the first company to produce a robot was Unimation, founded by Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger in 1956. Unimation robots were also called programmable transfer machines since their use at first was to transfer objects from one point to another. They used hydraulic actuators and were programmed in joint coordinates, i. e. the angles of the joints were stored during a teaching phase. They were accurate to within 1/10,000 of an inch, Unimation later licensed their technology to Kawasaki Heavy Industries and GKN, manufacturing Unimates in Japan and England respectively. For some time Unimations only competitor was Cincinnati Milacron Inc. of Ohio and this changed radically in the late 1970s when several big Japanese conglomerates began producing similar industrial robots. In 1969 Victor Scheinman at Stanford University invented the Stanford arm and this allowed it accurately to follow arbitrary paths in space and widened the potential use of the robot to more sophisticated applications such as assembly and welding. Scheinman then designed a second arm for the MIT AI Lab, Industrial robotics took off quite quickly in Europe, with both ABB Robotics and KUKA Robotics bringing robots to the market in 1973
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Electric motor
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An electric motor is an electrical machine that converts electrical energy into mechanical energy. The reverse of this is the conversion of energy into electrical energy and is done by an electric generator. In normal motoring mode, most electric motors operate through the interaction between an electric motors magnetic field and winding currents to generate force within the motor, small motors may be found in electric watches. General-purpose motors with highly standardized dimensions and characteristics provide convenient mechanical power for industrial use, the largest of electric motors are used for ship propulsion, pipeline compression and pumped-storage applications with ratings reaching 100 megawatts. Electric motors may be classified by electric power source type, internal construction, application, type of motion output, perhaps the first electric motors were simple electrostatic devices created by the Scottish monk Andrew Gordon in the 1740s. The theoretical principle behind production of force by the interactions of an electric current. The conversion of energy into mechanical energy by electromagnetic means was demonstrated by the British scientist Michael Faraday in 1821. A free-hanging wire was dipped into a pool of mercury, on which a permanent magnet was placed, when a current was passed through the wire, the wire rotated around the magnet, showing that the current gave rise to a close circular magnetic field around the wire. This motor is often demonstrated in experiments, brine substituting for toxic mercury. Though Barlows wheel was a refinement to this Faraday demonstration. In 1827, Hungarian physicist Ányos Jedlik started experimenting with electromagnetic coils, after Jedlik solved the technical problems of the continuous rotation with the invention of the commutator, he called his early devices electromagnetic self-rotors. Although they were used only for instructional purposes, in 1828 Jedlik demonstrated the first device to contain the three components of practical DC motors, the stator, rotor and commutator. The device employed no permanent magnets, as the fields of both the stationary and revolving components were produced solely by the currents flowing through their windings. His motor set a record which was improved only four years later in September 1838 by Jacobi himself. His second motor was powerful enough to drive a boat with 14 people across a wide river and it was not until 1839/40 that other developers worldwide managed to build motors of similar and later also of higher performance. The first commutator DC electric motor capable of turning machinery was invented by the British scientist William Sturgeon in 1832, following Sturgeons work, a commutator-type direct-current electric motor made with the intention of commercial use was built by the American inventor Thomas Davenport, which he patented in 1837. The motors ran at up to 600 revolutions per minute, and powered machine tools, due to the high cost of primary battery power, the motors were commercially unsuccessful and Davenport went bankrupt. Several inventors followed Sturgeon in the development of DC motors but all encountered the same battery power cost issues, no electricity distribution had been developed at the time
7.
Robotic arm
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A robotic arm is a type of mechanical arm, usually programmable, with similar functions to a human arm, the arm may be the sum total of the mechanism or may be part of a more complex robot. The links of such a manipulator are connected by joints allowing either rotational motion or translational displacement, the links of the manipulator can be considered to form a kinematic chain. The terminus of the chain of the manipulator is called the end effector. The end effector, or robotic hand, can be designed to any desired task such as welding, gripping, spinning etc. depending on the application. For example, robot arms in automotive assembly lines perform a variety of such as welding and parts rotation. In some circumstances, close emulation of the hand is desired, as in robots designed to conduct bomb disarmament. Cartesian robot / Gantry robot, Used for pick and place work, application of sealant, assembly operations, handling machine tools and its a robot whose arm has three prismatic joints, whose axes are coincident with a Cartesian coordinator. Cylindrical robot, Used for assembly operations, handling at machine tools, spot welding and its a robot whose axes form a cylindrical coordinate system. Spherical robot / Polar robot Used for handling tools, spot welding, diecasting, fettling machines, gas welding. Its a robot whose axes form a coordinate system. SCARA robot, Used for pick and place work, application of sealant, assembly operations and this robot features two parallel rotary joints to provide compliance in a plane. Articulated robot, Used for assembly operations, diecasting, fettling machines, gas welding, arc welding and its a robot whose arm has at least three rotary joints. Parallel robot, One use is a mobile platform handling cockpit flight simulators and its a robot whose arms have concurrent prismatic or rotary joints. Anthropomorphic robot, It is shaped in a way that resembles a hand, i. e. with independent fingers. The Curiosity rover on the planet Mars also uses a robotic arm, in the decade of 2010 the availability of low-cost robotic arms increased substantially. Although such robotic arms are mostly marketed as hobby or educational devices, applications in laboratory automation have been proposed, robot Arm Types How to build your printed robot arm assistant
8.
Degrees of freedom (engineering)
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In physics, the degree of freedom of a mechanical system is the number of independent parameters that define its configuration. The position of a car moving along a track has one degree of freedom because the position of the car is defined by the distance along the track. A train of rigid cars connected by hinges to an engine still has one degree of freedom because the positions of the cars behind the engine are constrained by the shape of the track. An automobile with highly stiff suspension can be considered to be a body traveling on a plane. This body has three independent degrees of freedom consisting of two components of translation and one angle of rotation, skidding or drifting is a good example of an automobiles three independent degrees of freedom. The position and orientation of a body in space is defined by three components of translation and three components of rotation, which means that it has six degrees of freedom. The exact constraint mechanical design method manages the degrees of freedom to neither underconstrain nor overconstrain a device, the number of rotational degrees of freedom comes from the dimension of the rotation group SO. A non-rigid or deformable body may be thought of as a collection of many minute particles, when motion involving large displacements is the main objective of study, a deformable body may be approximated as a rigid body in order to simplify the analysis. The degree of freedom of a system can be viewed as the number of coordinates required to specify a configuration. This reduces the degree of freedom of the system to five, see also Euler angles The trajectory of an airplane in flight has three degrees of freedom and its attitude along the trajectory has three degrees of freedom, for a total of six degrees of freedom. The mobility formula counts the number of parameters that define the configuration of a set of bodies that are constrained by joints connecting these bodies. Consider a system of n rigid bodies moving in space has 6n degrees of freedom measured relative to a fixed frame. In order to count the degrees of freedom of this system, include the frame in the count of bodies. Then the degree-of-freedom of the system of N = n +1 is M =6 n =6. Joints that connect bodies in this system remove degrees of freedom, specifically, hinges and sliders each impose five constraints and therefore remove five degrees of freedom. It is convenient to define the number of constraints c that a joint imposes in terms of the joints freedom f, where c =6 − f. In the case of a hinge or slider, which are one degree of freedom joints, have f =1, the result is that the mobility of a system formed from n moving links and j joints each with freedom fi, i =1. J, is given by M =6 n − ∑ i =1 j =6 + ∑ i =1 j f i Recall that N includes the fixed link, there are two important special cases, a simple open chain, and a simple closed chain
