Mitsubishi Electric has delivered its 1000th robot for training and education in German universities, colleges and schools. It is also reporting that robot installations in industry are up 20 percent on last year, with the growth rate set to accelerate next year.
Like its predecessors the educational robot will be integrated into a Festo Didactic’s training rig designed to emulate the real automated production cells encountered in industry. Unlike its predecessors, it will be a new model of robot, the RV-2JA has been developed by Mitsubishi to take over from the previous RV-M1 model.
Students are being taught about robotics more than ever because of their increasing take up. This is being fuelled in part because robots costs only about 1.64Euros/hour (about £1.20/hour) to run in industry, and their performance is always 100 per cent consistent. A particular trend noticed by Mitsubishi is that companies which transferred their manufacturing to low wage economies a few years ago are now bringing it home again, saying that robots take out the labour costs and local manufacturing is obviously easier to manage.
The RV-2JA is a 5-DOF (degrees of freedom) articulated arm robot designed for a wide variety of industrial automation tasks, including fabricating, assembling, packaging, palletising parts handing and loading/unloading. This adaptability along with a killer combination of power, precision, speed, compactness and reach and a new small control unit makes it ideal for education as well as industry.
Festo was delighted when told that the RV-2JA was under development, saying that part of the design philosophy for its train rigs to make them as near identical to industrial systems as possible, and a new robot would automatically upgrade and update the rig, keeping it in line with German industry.
The RV-2JA combines a compact size with a reach of over 400mm, making it ideally flexible for training use. In industry it is often installed right next to or even within the cell it is serving. In both situations the manoeuvrability makes small parts handling easy, while a pre-installed airline aids fitting of a pneumatic gripper. Other applications include sample testing in laboratories and medical facilities, inspection and quality control procedures.
A sister robot, the RV-1A offers a sixth axis of movement for even greater flexibility and is sometimes used in advanced Festo training rigs, as supplied to university and company training schools.
Mitsubishi’s 20 per cent growth rate suggests that it is gaining market share, because The International Federation of Robotics and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe have calculated that robot sales rose 17% last year, with that further robust growth expected over the next three years.
Currently, Japanese industry uses nearly 1,000,000 robots, about half of the world's robot population, but other countries are catching up fast. The Asian tiger economies - South Korea, China and Taiwan – are now investing in robots to stabilise their manufacturing output, while Europe and North America are turning to robots particularly for chemicals, machinery and food manufacturing.