Reuse of Industrial Robots

Abstract

EoL of industrial robots is currently only a partially solved problem. Usually the average life time of an industrial robot in industry, depending from the working and maintaining conditions, is in average 6-7 years because of the advances in IT hard-and software. Especially with the new headlines Procedure 4.0, Cyberphysical Systems (CPS). Most of the older robot-controllers cannot be used for these methods of production automation. The average lifetime of the robot mechanics is, depending from the industrial use between 10 and 20 years. A special case are robots for educational and research purposes. They should be also replaced every 5 - 7 years. Until now there was only the possibility to disassemble and sell the mechanical parts as spare parts. Therefore in this paper a new approach for reuse will be presented. The main idea beyond consists in using the mechanics of selected "old" industrial robots and a completely reengineering of the controller hard and software according to the latest requests from manufacturing automation. The authors created this idea some years ago and have developed a procedure geared to the automation of auxiliary processes in the die-casting industry. This procedure was applied to two types of robots. They are now equipped with new controllers from a local company which allows to include these robots in "modern" manufacturing automation systems. The new software and interface are more user-friendly and easy to use by the users in this field of automation.