Industrial Robot Application Trend in World’s Metal Industry
Technological success implies technical solution improvement in automation domain of technological process and intelligent system application in different branches of industry, along with a metal industry. A huge number of robot applications exist today in metalworking industry. Their application is motivated with the technical and economical reasons like: quality improvement of the completed products (machine processing and other), fallout decrease (in the assembly process), rate enlargement of the homogeneity-constancy quality (in all process linked to robot application repeatability), security operation rate enlargement (in aggressive, burning, explosive and other areas, with the high rate of robot protection), decrease of necessary work force of routine and repeatability process, manufacture cost minimizing and overall maintenance, fulfilling of demands required by a competition and more rigorous quality standards. Besides the technical advantages, which is carried out owing to the robot application, it is necessary to emphasize that rationality of the robot application in particular operations is principally conditioned with the manufacturing volume and the operation character which the robot (or more robots) needs to carry out. This paper provides an analysis of the industrial robot applications in metal industry worldwide, with a detailed analysis according to years and manufacturing process. The analysis has been carried out on all four continents: Europe, Asia, America and Africa. The parallel analysis with the other industries has been given in addition to analysis of economic justification of robot application in manufacturing process. The results of this research show increasing robot application in metal industry and in other industries, which was a primary goal of this research. By using available data concerning installed robots worldwide, such as analyzing profitability and economic justification of robot implementation in manufacturing process, and as a result of this research, the trend of robot application in metal industry has increasing trend today. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.23.4.2567