Procurement of industrial robots increased by 37% compared to 2020

According to Reuters, in the first nine months of 2021, orders for industrial robots have increased by 37% compared to the same period in 2020. A total of 29,000 robots were ordered to complete the task. The company cited manpower shortage and high demand as an excuse. Surprisingly, in the first three quarters of 2021, automakers no longer account for the majority of all robot purchases, and the merger of other companies has surpassed that of auto manufacturing robots.

It has been a long time since robots have been implemented in factories of this degree or in a factory-like environment. In his video series of robots, Dr. John Long, a professor of cognitive science at the John Gay Vassar Chair of Natural History at Vassar College, said that it took more than 80 years.

"Our first record of programmable pick and place robots is actually the most recent, starting in 1938," said Dr. Long. "Griffith P. Taylor published an article titled "Automated Block Crane: Meccano Model Controlled by Robot Cells"-he published this article in Meccano magazine."

According to Dr. Long, Taylor's robot will pick up a series of blocks and automatically create a circular stack in about 50 minutes. It has one degree of freedom of rotation to allow the arm to swing, and another degree of freedom of rotation to allow its grip to rotate, and then the gripper itself has rotatable jaws to clamp the bricks.

Finally, it has what Dr. Long called "two translational degrees of freedom with prismatic joints", which he likened to being able to change the length of the arm part. There are a total of five degrees of freedom to pick and place bricks. The robot is automatically controlled and programmable.

"By the way, Taylor's 1938 pick and place robot meets the International Organization for Standardization's definition of industrial robots," said Dr. Long. "'Automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multi-purpose three-axis or more-axis programmable manipulator, which can be fixed in place or moved for industrial automation applications.'"

According to Dr. Long, it took more than 20 years for Taylor's idea to become popular in industrial applications. He cited the first U.S. patent for the first commercially successful industrial robot, which was granted to George Devol in 1961. The name of the patent—"Programmed Article Transfer"—is far less exciting than what it does.

"Item transfer is a peculiar name for'pick and place'," Dr. Long said. "When you look at the numbers in the patent, what you see is the track along which the conveyor device moves. The conveyor belt runs parallel to these tracks. The conveyor arm passes through the conveyor belt, grabs the cartons from the pallet, and then transports the cartons Back to the conveyor belt."

Devol founded his company Unimation when he applied for a patent in 1956. Unimate is the abbreviation of General Automation and became the first company to manufacture industrial robots, named Unimates.

"The first Unimate robot was installed at the General Motors plant in 1962, the Inland Fisher Guide plant in Turnstedt, New Jersey," said Dr. Long. "General Motors uses Unimate to take out the hot metal sheets from the die casting machine and stack them up."

Less than 60 years later, as of 2020, there will be more than 2.7 million robots working in factories worldwide.

Edited by Angela Shoemaker, The Great Courses Daily

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