A practice household assistant for the home or office. Easy to program at a reasonable price. Who doesn‘t want this?
A new low-cost igus robotics concept from Treotham is intended to make everyday tasks like serving orange juice, loading the dishwashing machine or sorting purchases now possible.
Under the name ReBeL, igus has unveiled a new kind of joint, driven by a strain wave gear, as a single component, delivering a 6-axis service robot.
The new joint is fundamentally different to the previous robolink models: Instead of stepper motors, brushless direct-current motors are used in the joints for the first time.
Thanks to maintenance-free injection-moulded parts, the new ReBeL series is set to become a real bargain for robot manufacturers.
The growing demand for collaborative robotics – interaction between people and machines – is being embraced by igus with its new low-cost robolink technology.
The requirements for the components were that they must be light and cost-effective.
The result is the ReBeL joint, which igus presented to a specialist audience for the first time at Hannover Messe 2018, the world’s biggest industrial show, in Germany last month.
New solutions
"Alexa, bring me a glass of orange juice!" could thus become reality when the product is used in combination with a voice control system.
The new low-cost robotics concept is fundamentally different to that of the previous robolink joints and makes it possible for robot manufacturers to generate new solutions.
Instead of stepper motors, brushless direct-current motors (BLDC motors), which already belong to the state of the art in industrial robotics, are used.
Due to their small size, the BLDC motors can now be installed in the maintenance-free strain wave gear of a ReBeL joint.
The control equipment is also built into the axes and thus renders an external control cabinet superfluous.
All positions can now be reached
"The cables can now be routed directly inside a robot arm as a BUS system," explains Martin Raak, robolink product manager at igus GmbH.
"A further idea is to equip new joints with absolute encoders, that remember the position of an arm even when a power failure occurs," Mr Raak says.
The ReBeL now makes it possible to have the 6th rotation axis in the modular robolink system and thus allows all positions to be reached.
For bearing purposes, lubrication-free and smoothly operating xiros plastic ball bearings are used. As the gearboxes are also mostly made of polymers, the ReBeL system is very light.
The BLDC motors also contribute to weight reduction as they are lighter than the previously used stepper motors.
Suitable for home and factories
Injection-moulded parts ensure the small price of a ReBeL joint and therefore of the robot arms.
Mr Raak says igus wanted to make cost-effective robot arms and applications possible for mechanical engineering companies as well as domestic use.
The new system is suitable not only for tasks in the private area but also for other functions such as collection and delivery services or pick-and-place applications in factories.
They can also be used for mobile applications where the robot arm is mounted on a moving platform.
Treotham Automation Pty Ltd
1300 65 75 64
