In just three years, an improbable new technological concept emerged from nowhere and completely took over the market. In the process, it has given manufacturers across the world new capabilities, powerful new tools, and new hope for the future.
I met my first industrial robots three years ago at IMTS 2012. I had written about them for years, of course, and had read just about everything there was to read about them and their long, slow evolution.But 2012 was my first real-life encounter; my first chance to really get in and see what they could do. It wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined. I was hoping to get up close and personal with these machines and get a good look at their mechanics, their bright paint jobs, and awesome designs. What I got was a lot of fences, a lot of barriers, a lot of distant glimpses of the great machines in action. I wanted a wild safari, but I ended up with a tame zoo. The one exception, tucked away in the back of a quiet hall, was Universal Robots’ brand new collaborative robot. The Danish startup’s bots were a bit of an oddity at the time. They ran without the cages and barriers of traditional robots, in fact waving their arms through pre-programmed dances right over the heads of visitors. The UR staff drew crowds and shocked gasps by letting the robots run right into them on purpose. No one quite knew what to think of them. There wasn’t even a name for this kind of robot yet. Along with Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, these devices were forging a new direction for robotics, one that defied everything they had been doing for the previous 51 years. Travis HessmanEditor-in-Chief
New Equipment Digest
New Equipment Digest