Page 17 - Welding Robots Technology, System Issues, and Applications

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Introduction and Overview

1.1 Introduction

Actual market conditions are only compatible with small/medium batch
manufacturing, due to strong competition and dynamical behavior of the market. In
those conditions, robotic production setups exhibit the best “cost per unit”
performance if compared with manual work and with hard automated setups
(Figure 1.1) [1]. Consequently, near future requires powerful and more flexible
machines in order to handle requests from small businesses, which need more
remote interfaces, powerful programming languages, force control, powerful
Advanced Programming Interfaces (APIs) for high level programming, etc. That
means exposing to the user the flexibility stored inside the manufacturing robotic
machines, as a result of several decades of engineering, which is currently barely
used.

What makes robotics so interesting is that it is a science of ingenious devices,
constructed with precision, powered by a permanent power source, and flexible
from the programming point of view. That does not mean necessarily open source,
but instead the availability of powerful APIs, and de facto standards both for
hardware and software, enabling access to system potentialities without limitations.
This is particularly necessary on research environments, where a good access to
resources is needed in a way to implement and test new ideas. If that is available,
then a system integrator (or even a researcher) will not require open source
software, at least for the traditional fields of robotics (industrial robot manipulators
and mobile robots). In fact, that could also be very difficult to achieve since those
fields of robotics have decades of engineering efforts, achieving very good results
and reliable machines, which are not easy to match. That open source issue is
nevertheless very important for the emerging robotics research (like humanoid
robotics, space robotics, robots for medical use, etc.) as a way to spread and
accelerate development (Figure 1.2).

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