Walk into a modern automotive plant, a railcar factory, or a metal fabrication shop, and you will almost always find one thing: very large, very powerful robots doing the heavy lifting.
These machines do not resemble the compact cobots that dominate marketing campaigns, nor the humanoid prototypes that tend to draw public attention.
Instead, they are the unseen giants of industrial automation – rigid, anchored, high-payload robots designed to move, weld, grind, assemble and manipulate components that weigh hundreds of kilograms, sometimes more than a tonne. [Read more…] about Heavy-duty industrial robots: The big dragons of big industry