Robotics

Robots have come to play a widespread and crucial role in many industrial operations today. These robots are almost always of the Jacquard type—with few human features—rather than the Jacquet-Droz, doll-like style. The work that robots do can be classified into three major categories: in the assembly and finishing of products; in the movement of materials and objects; and in the performance of work in environmentally difficult or hazardous situations.

The most common single application of robots is in welding. About a quarter of all robots used by industry have this function. In a typical operation, two pieces of metal will be moved within the welding robot's field and the robot will apply the heat needed to create the weld. Welding robots can have a variety of appearances, but they tend to consist of one large arm that can rotate in various directions. At the end of the arm is a welding gun that actually performs the weld.

Closely related types of work now done by robots include cutting, grinding, polishing, drilling, sanding, painting, spraying, and otherwise treating the surface of a product. As with welding, activities of this kind are usually performed by one-armed robots that hang from the ceiling, project outward from a platform, or reach into a product from some other angle.

There are some obvious advantages for using a robot to perform tasks such as these. They are often boring, difficult, and sometimes dangerous tasks that have to be repeated over and over again in exactly the same way. Why should a human be employed to do such repetitive work, robotics engineers ask, when a machine can do the same task just as efficiently?

That argument can be used for many of the other industrial operations in which robots have replaced humans. Another example of such operations is the assembly of individual parts into some final product, as in the assembly of automobile parts in the manufacture of a car. At one time, this kind of assembly could have been done only by a crew of humans, each of whom had his or her own specific responsibility: moving a body section into position, welding it into place, installing and tightening bolts, turning the body for the next operation, and so forth. In many assembly plants today, the assembly line of humans has been replaced by an assembly line of robots that does the same job, but more safely and more efficiently than was the case with the human team.