OE-5.5 Robots & System Troubleshooting
You can describe robot structures by degrees of freedom, classify robots and their applications, and follow a systematic procedure for troubleshooting system failures.
Degrees of freedom is the organizing idea: it sets what poses the arm can reach and therefore what jobs it can do, and six is the number that gets you arbitrary position and orientation. The troubleshooting section is the most professionally useful part of the whole course and the most likely to be skipped - a systematic procedure beats intuition on any system you did not personally build. Read the factories-of-the-future material as a period document and compare it with what automation actually became.
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What robots are; robots and process control systems
What distinguishes a robot from any other controlled machine, and how it fits with everything above. Mostly it does not: a robot is a control system with more axes.
Degrees of freedom
How many independent ways a machine can move, which determines what it can reach and how hard the mathematics is. It is the first number quoted about any arm.
Factories of the future
Where this is all heading, taken as an overview. Read for direction rather than detail, since this item dates faster than the rest of the subject.
Delivery, disposal and transport systems
Moving material between machines, which is where most installed automation actually is. Less glamorous than arms and a larger share of the industry.
Sensing elements in robots
What a robot uses to perceive, connecting back to the sensor topics above. The same devices, arranged for a machine that moves.
Robot classifications and applications
The families of robot and what each is used for, which closes the subject. Matching a type to a task is the practical skill this whole course builds towards.
Troubleshooting system failures: preliminary steps and troubleshooting aids
Finding out why a system stopped working, which is most of what a maintenance engineer does. The preliminary steps matter because the expensive mistake is replacing parts before understanding the failure.
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