Renishaw has long been known as a provider of high-accuracy and precision encoder and measurement technologies to industry. Now, the company says it is looking to play a role in “transforming the process of commissioning and servicing industrial automation technologies…with new products designed to help simplify robot set-up, health checks and recovery of robotic applications following collisions.”
The new products referenced here by Renishaw are its new RCS product line, which focuses on problems such as operational accuracy and repeatability associated with manual set-up, calibration and maintenance of robots. Though the RCS product line represents a new direction for Renishaw, the company says the product line builds “on its existing expertise and technologies for industrial metrology applications to solve fundamental challenges within the global industrial automation industry.”
The RCS product line currently feaures three products:
• RCS L-90— a ballbar device that improves robot system accuracy, reduces deployment time and monitors robot health.
• RCS T-90—a tri-ballbar system, which enables robot users to identify root causes of poor performance with comprehensive tests to capture critical robot information, such as remastering the joint offsets to calculated positions, running master-recovery routines and plotting 3D path performance.
• RCS P-series—which integrates a Renishaw probing technology within a robot cell to apply in-process metrology and automatic recovery to automation processes.
Renishaw has also developed the RCS Software Suite, a dedicated software suite for the RCS product line. The company says the RCS product line and accompanying software can be used with robots from “a wide range of manufacturers.”
“The existing processes surrounding robot set-up and maintenance are largely manual for an industry built upon automation,” says Dr. Kevyn Jonas, director of Renishaw’s Industrial Automation Products Division. “With no existing comprehensive solutions, these [manual] methods have been accepted, until today. Robot integrators and users now finally have a solution for a quick, simple and traceable means to manage their robots.”
