Articulated Robot

The 6-axis articulated robot is the workhorse of industrial automation in the UK. It's the arm you'll find doing the majority of palletising, welding, packing or machine tending across UK manufacturing.

Its versatility comes from having 6 degrees of freedom. Each joint adds another axis of movement, and together they allow the arm to reach almost any position and orientation within its working/reach envelope. That matters on a real production line, where products aren't always presented perfectly, where the cell has to handle 15 different SKUs and where the robot needs to approach a pick point from an awkward angle because of how the line is laid out.

For most applications, an integrator's default starting point is a 6-axis articulated arm. The question is usually which one, and how big rather than whether to use one at all.

Each joint is driven by a servo motor and controlled precisely by the robot controller. The base joint rotates the whole arm horizontally. Moving up the arm, joints 2 and 3 handle the main extension and elevation, reach and height. The final 3 joints control wrist orientation, which is what allows the end-of-arm tooling to approach a product from almost any angle without repositioning the whole arm.

The robot controller calculates the exact joint positions needed for every point in the robot's path, a process called inverse kinematics. From the outside it looks fluid. Behind that, the controller is solving geometry equations several hundred times a second.

Programming is mostly done at a teach pendant, where the operator physically guides the arm through its positions and records them, or offline using simulation software. Offline programming is faster for complex applications with multiple programs and is increasingly common on multi-SKU lines, because you can build and test new pallet patterns in software without stopping the live cell to do it.