Factory Robots Monitor Their Own Health

How are you feeling this morning robot?

I'm okay but I could use a squirt of lubricant in my knuckle joint.

Mitsubishi Electric's latest generation of robots knows how it feels and will beg for service only when the time is right.
"The system calculates the next maintenance date very precisely on the basis of nearly 200 individual parameters, such as operating time, handling payload weight and the acceleration rates of the gripper arm.
The benefits are obvious: unnecessary and expensive down time is avoided, and the staff can plan the service work well in advance so that it does not conflict with normal operations."

It also has crash detection and joint strain limits to immediately stop if it gets into trouble.

According to this article, the self-aware robot arm has a life of 20,000 hours or, assuming 24 hours a day 365 days of the year, 2.3 years of life. For a single-shift workday the robot will live for 7 years.

That means to get robot years from human years you would multiply by 33 for 24-hour worked or by 11 for a day-shift bot.


Robot avoids crashes and calls for service: News from Mitsubishi Electric Automation Systems