Glossary · Robotics
Robotics
Also known as: Robot technology
German: Robotik
Robotics is the engineering discipline concerned with the design, construction, control, programming and application of robots, combining mechanics, electrical engineering, control engineering, sensing and computer science.
- Robotics
In one sentence
Robotics is the engineering discipline of designing, building, controlling, programming and applying robots.
Example
The company's robotics department designs grippers, programs the robots and integrates them into the assembly lines.
How it applies
- Engineering: Industrial robotics projects span mechanics (robot and gripper selection), controls, vision and safety. Many projects fail at interfaces between these disciplines rather than inside them.
- Operation: Robotics skills in the plant include programming, recovery after faults, maintenance and calibration; the skill mix affects how applications should be designed.
- Documentation: The documentation team should set up a shared terminology for robotics terms early in a project and align it with the robot supplier's vocabulary, so that manuals, HMI texts and training use the same words.
Robotics vs. automation
Automation is the wider field of making processes run without human intervention. Robotics is the part that uses programmable, actuated mechanisms. Increasingly, robotics uses Artificial intelligence (AI) for perception and planning.