Choosing your kinematics: navigating fixed arms, mobile payloads, and collaborative robots

Osedea’s R&D Hub has had the opportunity to work with various robotic arms for different projects. The global robotic arm market is in full force, with 4 million industrial robots in operation worldwide. Projections show that it will triple in the following decade, driven by Industrial 4.0 and AI integration to reduce operational costs (Data Bridge Market Research, 2024). In this article, we will explore a high-level overview of a few, along with their limitations and their distinct advantages.

The Evolution of Fixed Industrial Robotic Arms

Believe it or not, the first large-scale industrial robotic arms in manufacturing were used in 1961. Since then, technology has evolved rapidly. For years, we’ve kept these robotic arms in cages, safely doing repeated tasks over and over again throughout the day. The advancement of these technologies has improved safety and efficiency tenfold, resulting in a high-value-added impact on our workflows.

Luckily for us, the technology continues to improve, and introducing these robots into our production lines and facilities is more accessible than ever. That being said, we can do better, and we already are.

Of course, traditional fixed arms are still the undisputed champions of extreme speed and sub-millimeter precision; they have a massive impact in industries like welding and automotive assembly, to name a few. However, they lack the flexibility needed for modern, dynamic problems in some contexts.

Mobile Robot Arms: Extending Reach and Flexibility

Osedea became a business partner of Boston Dynamics back in 2021. With this collaboration, we started working with their Spot robot, for instance, with the STM. Our unit was equipped with their arm payload. This manipulator payload offers key advantages by allowing for the mobile manipulation of environments.

At its debut, the arm was limited, but the workflows exposed by the Boston Dynamics Spot platform allowed for simple tasks like picking up an object. Once picked up, you could walk the robot anywhere you wanted and drop the object. Additional workflows like opening doors (a pretty cool thing to see, albeit a tad scary when on the other side of the door) and the manipulation of interfaces like levers and valves quickly came to the platform.

This was a massive benefit for specific use cases. We can now walk Spot into a dangerous environment—imagine a gas leak—and use the arm to turn off a valve, stopping the leak. For example, Ontario Power Generation developed a use case to autonomously trip and rack circuit breakers (which can be seen in this video), keeping operators entirely out of harm's way.

While the Spot arm payload has its physical limitations, its utility will only improve as we use Physical AI principles to add more intelligence to the platform. With its built-in cameras, an intelligent VLM (Vision-Language Model), and the ability to rapidly simulate and train agents on various scenarios, our limitations are drastically reduced.

Cobots: Ensuring Safety Without Sacrificing Efficiency

Traditional industrial arms can be very dangerous. Because they are often unaware of their environment and move at high speeds, collisions are inevitable during a dynamic routine or in a changing workspace.

The solution is to introduce Power and Force Limiting (PFL), a universal standard in cobots such as the units produced by Universal Robots. By adding these joint torque sensors, cobots constantly monitor the resistance they encounter. Upon detecting a micro-spike in force, the cobot will safely halt within milliseconds.  This feature allows for safe applications to be developed when working alongside operators or within tight environments.

This monitoring of its physical environment is crucial for applications of Physical AI, where the robot's path is not necessarily pre-defined. Read our take in: The Rise of Physical AI: Moving from Rigid Automation to Autonomous Data Collection.

Collaborating on the Future of Autonomy

We reject one-size-fits-all robotics. We engineer custom solutions that integrate complex software intelligence with physical reality, whether you require the precision of a fixed arm, the reach of a mobile payload, or the safety of a cobot. Let us collaborate on your specific defect detection needs or explore the potential of Physical AI in your facility. Let’s talk about what’s possible.