Industrial robots have been in use for about 50 years. The first industrial robots were used for material handling at General Motors facilities. Nowadays, various applications are possible through robots. But which one is the most popular? The top five applications for industrial robots are:
1 – Robotic handling tasks (38%)
Material handling is the most popular application, accounting for 38% of the global industrial robot operating inventory. This includes a variety of tasks for robotic machine tending, palatalization, metal processing and plastic molding. With the introduction of collaborative robots over the past few years, this segment of the market is always growing.
2 – Robotic welding (29%)
This segment mainly includes spot welding and arc welding, which are mainly used in the automotive industry. Spot welding is still more popular than robotic arc welding, but not for as long. This is because arc welding is becoming very popular in the metal industry. More and more small workshops are starting to introduce welding robots into their production. In fact, as robot prices come down and a variety of tools come onto the market, it has become easier to automate the welding process.
3 – Robot Assembly (10%)
Assembly operations include fixing, pressing, inserting, and disassembling. This category of robotics applications appears to have declined over the past few years while other robotics applications have increased. The reason the application fields are diversifying is because various technologies that give robots more senses, such as force torque sensors and tactile sensors, are being introduced.
4 – Robotic dispensing (4%)
Here we are talking about painting, gluing, applying adhesive seals, spraying, etc. Only 4% of work robots perform dispensing. The softest robots create repeatable and accurate processes.
5 – Robotic processing (2%)
Machining is not a large part of industrial robots (only 2%), which is probably because there are many automated machines on the market specifically to perform these applications. Main areas of application are mechanical, laser and waterjet cutting. As you can see in the picture, sawing operations can now be performed by robots. What are the next steps?
Note: The data is taken from the 2010 World Robotics, a survey conducted by the IFR Statistics Office. This takes into account the global operating inventory of industrial robots as of the end of 2009.
