A few decades ago, industrial robots were extraordinary because they could place heavy parts with centimetre-level accuracy. Today, the competitive benchmark has shifted by several orders of magnitude.
Modern precision robots routinely achieve ±5 µm repeatability, with some specialist motion stages achieving sub-micrometre accuracy. To put that into context:
- 1 micrometre (µm) equals one-thousandth of a millimetre, often called a micron. Put another way, 1 micrometre is one-millionth of a metre.
- A human hair is roughly 70 to 100 µm thick.
- An advanced SCARA robot can place components with an error margin smaller than one-tenth of a human hair’s diameter.
- High-end photonics assembly systems use motion stages with a command resolution of 0.1 µm – too fine for the average human eye to see, even when aided by most optical microscopes.