The No. 1 application for robots—be they Cartesian, SCARA, delta or six-axis models—is also the easiest: pick up a part from one location and place it in another.
“Nearly 60 percent of working industrial robots in North America are used for parts handling of some type,” explains Sebastian Schmitt, North America manager of robotics at Staubli Corp. “According to the first quarter 2018 statistics of the Robotics Industry Association, 53 percent of all robots pick and place parts during machine tending, and another 7 percent handle parts for other types of assembly.”