Three Million Hours of Robot Field Experience

Abstract

Unimate Industrial Robots have accumulated over 3,000,000 hours of operation on the job in a broad range of factory installations. After touching on the kinds of work experience, the paper attempts to look at the lessons learned from the point of view of a manufacturer weighing various means for increasing productivity. Can industrial robot history convince potential users that robots really work, that they work reliably, and that they endure on the job? Given that much, do robots offer an attractive cost/benefit outlook?