Robots and Automatic Factories

Abstract

Industrial robots bear little resemblance to the science fiction concept of futuristic machines — they are little more than machine tools except that their prime function is handling not making components. Being designed to replace a human operator, many of the machines currently available are somewhat similar in scale to a human being although their continuous weight lifting abilities can be much in excess of a human. They generally have one manipulating arm and there are three classical types of robot architecture: