Since 2008, the sales volume of industrial robots in China has rapidly expanded, and the sales volume in 2012 has reached 23,000 units. The number of industrial robots has jumped from 3,500 units in 2000 to nearly 100,000 units. These growth demands mainly come from industries such as automobiles, metals, electronics and machinery manufacturing.

Chi Yonglin, Operations Manager of ABB Precision Assembly Center, said: “In all application fields, the penetration rate of industrial robots is less than 12%, and the market demand potential is huge. Especially in the Chinese market, as manufacturing costs increase, the demographic dividend begins to fade. The increasing demand for robots to replace labor will drive the upgrade of the entire manufacturing equipment and technology."

The growth of the robotics industry is in full swing and blossoms everywhere. A large number of machine tool manufacturers, servo manufacturers and other qualified enterprises have turned to the robot market one after another. Why are machine tool manufacturers and servo manufacturers so actively transforming and developing robots? The industrial robot has 4 major components, namely the body, servo, reducer and controller. Among them, servo and controller are both machine tool manufacturers are good at, so a large number of machine tool manufacturers choose robots as the direction of product transformation and upgrading.

The control system and automation products of industrial robots mainly involve servo motors, reducers, controllers and sensors. The servo motor can be divided into two parts, one is the motor body, and the other is the motion control system.

Motor

The motor is used to drive the joints of the robot. The requirements are to have the maximum power-to-mass ratio and torque-to-inertia ratio, high starting torque, low inertia, and a wide and smooth speed adjustment range. In particular, the end effector (claw) of a robot should use a motor with a volume and mass as small as possible. Especially when fast response is required, the servo motor must have high reliability and a large short-term overload capacity.

At present, AC and DC servo motors with high starting torque, large torque and low inertia are widely used in industrial robots.

Servo control system is an automatic control system that takes mechanical position or angle as the control object, such as CNC machine tools, robots, etc. The drive motor used in the servo system requires fast response, accurate positioning, and moment of inertia (the servo motor used in the electromechanical system has a large moment of inertia, in order to be directly connected to the screw and other mechanical components. There is a special type of servo motor. In order to obtain a very high response speed, the small inertia motor of this type of motor has low overload capacity, and when used in a feed servo system, an acceleration and deceleration device must be used.

The general structure of the industrial robot electric servo system is three closed-loop controls, namely, current loop, speed loop and position loop. Generally, for AC servo drives, various functions such as position control, speed control, and torque control can be realized by manually setting its internal function parameters.

Tamagawa General Agent in China

Airtech Automation is responsible for the sales of Japanese Tamagawa products in China. The main products include encoders, stepping motors, servo motors, electronic cams, speed sensors, resolvers, trackballs and other high-precision positioning detection components. Products are widely used in aerospace, robotics, underwater facilities, elevators, textiles, semiconductors, packaging machinery, handling machinery and factory automation, etc.