5 most popular applications
Industrial robots have been in use for about 50 years. The first industrial robot was used for material handling in a General Motors facilities. Nowadays, many different applications can be done by robots. But which ones are the most popular? Here are the top 5 applications for industrial robots:
1 – Robotic handling operations (38%)
Material handling is the most popular application with 38% of operational stock of industrial robots worldwide. This includes machine tending, palatalizing and various operations for metal machining and plastic moulding.
2 – Robotic Welding (29%)
This segment mostly includes spot welding and arc welding which is mainly used by the automotive industry. Spot welding is still more popular than arc welding but not for long; as arc welding is becoming very popular in the metal industry.
3 – Robotic Assembly (10%)
Assembly operations include: fixing, press-fitting, inserting, disassembling, etc. This category of robotic applications seems to have decreased over the last few years, even while other robotic applications have increased.
4 – Robotic Dispensing (4%)
Here we are talking about painting, gluing, applying adhesive sealing, spraying, etc. Only 4% of the opreational robots are doing dispensing.
5 – Robotic Processing (2%)
Processing is not a big segment of industrial robots (only 2%) and this is probably because a lot of automated machines are available on the market to do specifically these applications. The main application areas are mechanical, laser and water jet cutting.
Let's take a look how robots perform in modern industry:
Let's take a look how robots perform in modern industry:
