Robots in industrial applications: State of the art and current trends

This Chapter aims at analyzing the state of the art in industrial robotics, in terms of successful industrial applications, from the perspective of robotic manufacturers and system integrators. It is worth to note that some of the solutions presented hereafter as innovative may be well known among the scientific community. However, due to many reasons, they only recently reached the market. The idea is to highlight the gap between recent research results and industrial applications to stimulate the technology transfer from academia to common practice. Firstly, the current market of industrial robotics will be analyzed and future trends discussed, in term of number and type of installed robots as well as in term of available technology. At the beginning the paper presents official statistics updated to 2010. These statistics are derived from those collected by IFR (International Federation of Robotics) in cooperation with OECD and UNECE. The selected data describe the size of the market, the more consolidated applications and the new trends. The second part of the chapter describes the robotic technology available on the market, in term of kinematical structure of the manipulators, programmability of robotized cells, and sensors to improve flexibility. The different robot typologies are reviewed with respect to the robot applications and commercially available models. The topics are discussed with several references to standard and innovative applications highlighting where technology transfer and/or some degree of innovation is still necessary.