THE ANATOMY OF A ROBOT

The term robot stems from the Czech word robota, which translates roughly as ‘dull, repetitive labour’. Although robots are indeed often associated with performing highly repetitive, routine applications, today’s flexible automation technology lends itself to much more than that, undertaking sophisticated precision tasks that a human cannot hope to emulate. But to understand quite what applications the technology is capable of and where it might be integrated into your own production processes, it is important to appreciate the anatomy of a robot, or more accurately an industrial robot, since that governs its functionality.