The era of large-scale robotic laser processing has arrived
The birth of robots and the establishment and development of robotics are the most convincing achievements in the field of automatic control in the 20th century and a major achievement of human science and technology progress in the 20th century. In 1959, the world’s first industrial robot was born. In 1969, General Motors installed the world’s first robot spot welding processing system. Immediately afterwards, Italy’s Fiat Motors and Japan’s Nissan Motor successively installed robot spot welding production lines, and industrial robots officially entered the scale. An era in which technology replaces artificial manufacturing.
The birth of robots and the establishment and development of robotics are the most convincing achievements in the field of automatic control in the 20th century and a major achievement of human science and technology progress in the 20th century. In 1959, the world’s first industrial robot was born. In 1969, General Motors installed the world’s first robot spot welding processing system. Immediately afterwards, Italy’s Fiat Motors and Japan’s Nissan Motor successively installed robot spot welding production lines, and industrial robots officially entered the scale. An era in which technology replaces artificial manufacturing.
There are now nearly 2 million robots in the world, with sales growing at an annual rate of 20%. Robotics technology and industry have experienced unprecedented development. With the continuous expansion of robot application fields, robots have entered human work and life areas from traditional manufacturing industries. Elsewhere, as the scope of demand continues to expand, the development of robot structures and forms has become diversified. High-end manufacturing systems have obvious bionic and high-intelligence characteristics. As its performance continues to improve, its functions continue to expand and improve, various robot systems are gradually developing towards higher intelligence and closer harmony with human society!
At present, countries with a large number of production and assembly robots are mainly in Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea. In the 1970s and 1980s, they completed the first round of large-scale application of industrial robots and promoted the shift of industrial manufacturing to automation. Before the financial crisis in 2008, my country’s industrial manufacturing mainly relied on labor-intensive processing industries. In 2008, domestic labor costs increased year by year, and automated machine tools and industrial robots entered production lines on a large scale to replace labor. In the past, it was common for a toy, electronics or shoe factory to have over 10,000 employees in the Pearl River Delta, but now it is very rare. At the same time, developed countries such as Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea have not stopped the development of industrial automation. Instead, they have launched a second round of industrial robot applications. This time it is intelligent robot technology that combines big data, machine vision, the Internet, etc. , while my country’s industrial robot development did not go through the first round and directly entered the second round of intelligent robot applications.
2. Robotic laser processing has become a unique process in each production link
The advantages of using robots in industrial manufacturing are very obvious. In addition to being able to replace manual work 24 hours a day, they can also reduce errors. Especially in some environments with high temperatures, high risks, dust, and polluted gases, they can replace manual labor and improve the health of workers. Provides great protection. As a non-contact machining process, laser processing has gradually been recognized over the past decade. Due to its good processing quality and output rate, it has become a unique process in various production links. In the past few years, the mechanical processing industry has been slightly weak, and laser processing equipment has become a dark horse in the stamping, bending, cutting machine tools and other mechanical equipment markets, with an average annual growth of more than 20%. Low-power lasers ranging from milliwatts to tens of watts can be used for precision processing such as marking, engraving, drilling, and micro-cutting, while high-power lasers ranging from hundreds of watts to tens of thousands of watts are suitable for cutting, welding, and cutting of large metal materials. Restoration, its uses are very wide.
Traditional laser processing was limited to plane two-dimensional processing. It was not until the late 1980s that people began to integrate lasers into industrial robots. Automobile companies such as General Motors and Volvo were early adopters. In 1999, the German Leis Robotics Company first introduced a laser beam transmission system into the robot arm and integrated the first in-arm robot CO2 laser processing system. The application of robots enables this light knife to achieve multi-dimensional and flexible processing, greatly breaking through the limitations and application space of the original two-dimensional processing.
3. Robotic laser automotive processing has become a general trend
In today’s automobile manufacturing industry, competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and new products must be continuously introduced to meet the pursuit of high-end products and cater to popular needs. Therefore, the quantification of each variety is getting smaller and smaller, and the product life of each variety is getting shorter and shorter. This requires automobile manufacturers to continuously tap their potential, improve manufacturing technology, and strive to reduce production costs, including the trial production costs of new products. As early as 10 years ago, European and American companies have gradually promoted the use of robotic laser cutting machines for the production of automotive sheet metal.
Over the years, my country’s robotic laser processing technology and equipment have experienced a development process from scratch, from small to large, and now have formed a considerable industrial scale. Robotic laser cutting has been widely used in sheet metal processing, automobile manufacturing, chassis and electrical cabinet production, elevator manufacturing, agricultural machinery, shipyards and other industrial fields. The automobile manufacturing industry is an industry with a high concentration of high-tech. Laser is an advanced manufacturing method. In developed industrial countries such as Europe and the United States, 50% to 70% of automobile parts are processed by laser processing. Laser applications in the automobile industry Mainly laser welding and laser cutting, laser cutting includes plane cutting, three-dimensional cutting, etc. An application of robotic laser cutting in automobile manufacturing, the era of large-scale laser processing has arrived.
5. Robotic 3D laser cutting becomes a new fashion
3D laser cutting is also called three-dimensional laser cutting. The three-dimensional laser cutting machine is also called a robot laser cutting machine. It is a laser processing system that is not controlled by the cutting direction and can cut freely. Generally speaking, 3D laser cutting machines mainly consist of cutting heads, tracking systems, lasers, beam transmission and industrial robot systems. It can perform multi-angle and all-round flexible cutting processing of metal materials of different thicknesses.
Three-dimensional laser cutting is highly flexible. Under normal circumstances, a set of molds can only be used for one process of one workpiece, while three-dimensional laser cutting can be used for any process of any workpiece. When the workpiece product changes, such as changes in curved surfaces, trimming, holes, etc., only the offline program of laser cutting needs to be changed. Because the tooling fixture used is relatively simple, it is also convenient to change the tooling fixture.
The advantages of three-dimensional laser welding technology are gradually being discovered. Compared with laser cutting, which has a simple process, laser welding needs to consider factors such as workpiece positioning, applicable energy, applicable materials, welding environment, motion system, fixture, software system design, etc. Therefore, the scale of laser welding application development will be larger than that of pure cutting. As mentioned above, two-dimensional laser welding has obvious limitations. After the robot laser welding system came out, more complex laser welding has been applied. The most obvious one is the laser welding of automobile body-in-white, roof and back cover, which is the most popular one. As we all know, laser welding is also used to join the stainless steel plates at the bottom of the cabin in aircraft manufacturing. In the early years, some small batteries for daily necessities and electronic products have been sealed by laser welding. In the past three years, the power battery welding application of new energy vehicles has brought billions of equipment needs to the laser industry.
6. Development status of robotic laser three-dimensional processing
With the two-dimensional laser processing market fully developed, many people regard three-dimensional processing as the next market hot spot in laser manufacturing. Current three-dimensional laser processing applications include laser cutting, laser welding, laser drilling and other systems, which have irreplaceable advantages for large, three-dimensional and irregular geometrically shaped workpieces. Since the robotic laser processing system involves many aspects of robotics, automation control, and laser expertise, companies currently engaged in the development of such systems on the market are mainly companies in these three fields.
In European and American countries, the relationship between these three types of enterprises is like fish and water. Technology development and business cooperation are very close. But what puzzles the author is that exchanges and cooperation between these three types of enterprises in our country do not seem to be frequent and rare. to cross-border joint development. The result is that to build a three-dimensional laser processing system, laser companies purchase robotic arms, robot companies purchase lasers, optical components, and cooling equipment, and automation equipment integration companies purchase not only robotic arms, but also lasers and optical components, and then everyone Develop it yourself. Such a pattern is actually not conducive to the promotion of three-dimensional laser processing.
Although many laser companies can currently provide robotic laser processing equipment, the number of orders has not been obvious in batches. One reason is that robotic laser processing equipment is generally a customized designed product. One set is often a workstation, and the processing efficiency is relatively high. High, it can meet the production requirements of general quantities. In addition, the purchase cost of a set of robotic laser processing systems is also high. As long as the processing capacity can be met, users will not make further bulk purchases. It is understood that some large domestic automobile manufacturers that currently use laser processing have less than Ten laser robot processing systems.
7. The robot market will reach US$40 billion in 2020
China and major developed countries around the world are going through an automation upgrading stage of robot replacement. A foreign analysis agency conducted a research and analysis on the industrial manufacturing robot market, which also includes use in the fields of laser cutting and laser welding. It predicts that by 2020 , the market will expand to US$40 billion.
Specifically, industrial manufacturing robots can be divided into electronic components, electrical components, and mechanical parts. The main application directions of robots can be divided into welding robots (including arc welding, gas welding, laser welding, electric welding), logistics transportation robots (including machine tools) Operation, packaging, warehousing), packaging and packaging robots, cutting and polishing robots, workshop inspection robots and testing robots, etc.
Currently, globally, the first echelons in the robot industry are Japan’s FANUC, Yaskawa, Switzerland’s ABB and Germany’s KUKA. The four major families have their own strengths in various technical fields. ABB’s core area is in control systems, KUKA is in system integration applications and body manufacturing, FANUC is in CNC systems, and Yaskawa is in servo motors and motion controllers. The world’s “four major families” are already recognized leaders in the industry. However, my country’s robot consumer market is huge. By the end of last year, my country’s import volume of multi-functional industrial robots had reached 81,300 units, posing a great challenge to the production capacity of traditional leaders. This has led to the strong demand for domestic industrial robots overflowing to domestic manufacturers, and the huge Stimulated by the market, domestic manufacturers have continued to make breakthroughs in technology, effectively accumulated market reputation, and have a trend of continuous expansion. In 2017, it accounted for 45.4% of the global market share. Capacity expansion projects such as Xinsong Robot, Topstar (300607), and Eston (002747) have been intensively put into production in 2018 and 2019, and are expected to efficiently seize the exploding domestic market. In terms of core technology, it is catching up with the four major families. Riselaser also combines robots and laser welding to provide an innovative robotic laser welding system.
Conclusion:
Industrial robots are an advanced industry leading industrial development. The industry is developing rapidly and its scale is constantly expanding. The robots that are now widely used are not only industrial robots, but also service robots and special robots. We must further promote the integration of industry resources and pass The power of various social resources jointly promotes the industry to continuously achieve technological breakthroughs.
Integrating lasers and optical systems into industrial robots gives laser processing new modes and application space. The multi-dimensional characteristics of robots and the advantages of laser processing promote each other. Every addition of a robot laser processing system requires at least one A set of lasers and a complete set of laser optics will bring new demands to laser products. According to the national plan, in the next ten years, my country will focus on the stable development of key areas such as rail transportation, energy-saving devices, new energy vehicles, offshore equipment, machinery manufacturing, aerospace and so on. During the production process of products in these industries, most of them require three-dimensional, flexible, efficient and highly automated processing technology, and robotic laser processing just meets these requirements.
I believe that with the continuous improvement of various parts processing requirements and the continuous development of laser technology, all laser companies, robot companies and automation equipment companies will surely innovate and launch better and more advanced robot laser processing systems in the country to meet the needs of With the growing needs of the manufacturing industry, it can be said that an era of large-scale adoption of robotic laser processing technology has arrived.
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