I was at the Pack Expo show on Wednesday, 10/31/2012 and saw a lot of robots. The use of “parallel-arm” robots (Fanuc calls them “fist” robots) was impressive. There were a lot of them, they were fast and they were accurate. Particularly impressive was a Fanuc model M-1iA demonstrating sorting pills by color at the rate of about 3/second and putting them in three different jars.
Afterward, I found the Fanuc website and there are over 100 videos of different Fanuc robots in operation. These can be found at: http://www.fanucrobotics.com/home/Videos/
The pill-sorting one is on page 5, second from the bottom (#59?). Enjoy!
To my knowledge, this type of robot arm has not been used in FRC or FTC, but it may have an application in the future using 3 servos and inverted from the one in the video. It would not move a large, massive game piece, but maybe in the future, we can use more powerful servos.
Not to start a war of who’s better, but I’d like to talk about ABB. ABB is more than just a robotic automation company. It also has an electrical division that designs and builds large transformers, motors and generators, and even substations. But this is robotics… Not electrical.
A few years ago, Multimove was developed. Multimove is an innovative way to make industrial robots move together in unison. For example: say that I want to have 1 robotic arm move an engine block while another robot applies sealant to the edges (random example). If the sealant robot is tethered to the engine block robot, no matter where the engine block is moved, the sealant robot will stay with the engine block (as long as it doesn’t move outside of the robot’s reach). Here is a video example.
(if you weren’t impressed, watch this video)
As for other things, ABB’s Flexpicker is an unmatchable robot in positioning things on conveyors. Here is an example of this. The Flexpicker has been around for nearly 10 years… Fanuc just only came out with their version of the Flexpicker last year.
In the catergory of control, ABB’s IRC5 is undoubtedly more powerful than Fanuc’s control systems. With ABB’s Flexpendant, you have control of a whole robot system at your fingertips. With a fully interactive touch-screen, the Flexpendant can control anything from the speed of the system to even tweaking points.
Some may agree with me, some may not. But in my humble opinion, ABB is a more powerful and reliable robotics company than Fanuc.
I worked at ABB for two years as a summer intern, and I always thought the FlexPicker and MultiMove were two of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I got to set up a couple demos for the MultiMove right as it was getting rolled out, and I was floored the first time I saw a couple of IRB140s moving in perfect synchronization.
