Since the beginning of January 1971 when the first Electrolux MHU industrial robot was installed for the production of motor housings for electric motors MHUs have been applied in many different types of production areas and industries in fourteen countries.

It is increasingly difficult to persuade young people to make a life‐work of the hot brass die stamping process. The job is noisy, hot, dirty, largely manual, and tedious. The degree of skill required, the variety of set‐ups — particularly in batch production, and the need to up‐grade...

Commercially, there are several part manipulators (robots) available today. The major task of these robots is to position parts accurately in space or to orient its gripper so as to pick up a part accurately. Several of these devices have a “teach” mode, where the positional commands can be...

The programmable sequence‐control systems used for most of the industrial robots available at the present time are basically simple and straight‐forward. While these are very desirable attributes for any system which has to achieve reliability in the performance of a repetitive task on the...

A new robot system has been industrially developed for applications far beyond materials handling. The combination of CNC‐microcomputer control, all‐electrical DC‐drives, and a new geometry, results in a robot with unusually high programmability, accuracy and compactness. The robot is...

A method to provide control of continuous type robots by means of a process minicomputer was developed and patented by FIAT‐SPE in 1974. The minicomputer acts as a robot controller using data stored in its magnetic core memory to reconstruct previously learned trajectories. It is possible to...

The paper presents a method of centering flat objects. An objects position can be computed in a fraction of a second with great accuracy. The method makes the construction of automatic center systems easier. Application of the method to the automatic assembly of integrated circuits can decrease...

A minicomputer has been employed to monitor and control an advanced industrial robot during transfers of colour TV picture tubes between two asynchronous conveyors. The robot system described herein extracts a face up picture tube, from the index conveyor, inverts it, tracks a continually moving...

This paper is concerned with the organizational, technical and economic impact of Industrial Robots. Some general remarks concerning the main reasons for the robot developments in big Italian manufacturing companies is thoroughly discussed using case‐study results of an Industrial Robot...

The handling of initially disordered mechanical parts with a robot manipulator needs some procedure for orientating these parts. A simple microprocessor‐controlled TV‐sensor which enables an industrial robot to perform this function by measurement of orientation and position of the parts is...