Modern manufacturing robots are far more precise than they look. A six-axis industrial robot can move a tool through several metres of space and repeatedly bring it back to within a few hundredths of a millimetre. Some precision oriented systems achieve repeatability of around 0.02-0.05 mm. That precision is... one reason mass manufacturing looks the way it does today. A car body can move through a factory floor while robots weld the same points, drill the same holes and paint complex surfaces with almost identical movements, thousands of times over. The first industrial robots entered factories in the early 1960s, mostly doing repetitive and dangerous work. Sixty years later, they can repeat precise movements thousands of times with a consistency that humans simply cannot maintain at industrial scale.show more

This is as big of a leap as standardization of parts was compared to the creation of custom parts by every worker.

Absolutely. Standardized parts made mass production repeatable at the component level, robotics pushed that same principle into the manufacturing process itself. Now not only the part, but the weld, hole, paint path and assembly movement can be repeated thousands of times with extraordinary consistency. It is also one reason two cars of the same model leaving a factory today are remarkably similar, whereas 50-60 years ago considerably more unit to unit manufacturing variation was normal.

Meanwhile my 3D printer fights for 0.1 mm and this KUKA holds 0.02 all day. Every time I watch a robot trace the same weld path hundreds of times, I respect the specs more. Specs really do matter.

With some machine learning and some laser inferometers for calibration you can get repeatable accuracy as good as 5 microns. Look up Xaba Inc . They are experts at getting that sort of accuracy from polar axis robots.

I'll be impressed if it can maintain that precision through a magnitude 9 earthquake.

She used to check my social media posts like that

I'd prefer to work in a factory of robots than BAE.

And yet car bodies still have tolerances that stack up to mm.

The robot itself can repeat a movement to within hundredths of a millimetre, but the car body is made from hundreds of individual stamped and joined parts, each with its own small dimensional variation. Those imperfections accumulate through the assembly, and welding itself can introduce further distortion. So by the time you measure across the completed body, the tolerance can easily be in millimetres.

Right. There.

Indian billionaire could've purchase that robot when it's up for sale in germany but china grab it