Articulating Robots from Olympus Technologies Ltd.

An articulating robot consists of parts which are connected by bending or rotating joints (axes), simulating the movement capability of a human arm. The most common type are six axis vertical articulating robots. Also available are horizontal articulating robots which work in a horizontal plane, moving up and down with a linear axis 2.

Articulating robots allow very versatile manipulation of either parts or tools, for example, running a weld seam around a complex shape or transferring a part from one machine to another where it needs to be in a different orientation. They are ideally suited to welding & cutting and laser applications. The robots are simple to program - they can be moved manually either one axis at a time or using cartesian (X-Y-Z) movements and then taught a series or positions with instruction for the type of path to follow between positions.

Standard articulating robots do have quite a limited working area and significantly reduced payload near to full stretch.Olympus can supply vertical articulating robots with payloads ranging from 6kg to 240kg and horizontal articulating robots up to 300kg payload. The modular design of the robots also means that articulating robot parts can be combined with linear robot parts to produce combined kinematics robots and used with additional axes such as turntables.