www.engineeringnet.co.uk/features/eng02200109.htm -
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Published on: 6/24/2004
Last Visited: 6/24/2004
In fact, according to Mike Wilson, chairman of the IFR and chief executive of Oxford based company Meta Vision Technologies, the figures set a new record."Never before," he says, "have the European Union and the United States invested in so many industrial robots in a single year."
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Key elements in spurring on this growth, says Wilson, are sharply declining robot prices coupled with noticeably improved performance.The price of an average robot in 1999 was one fifth the 1990 cost of an equivalent machine.Consequently payback times for robot investments can now be in the region of one to two years.At the same time the economic life of a robot can typically range from 12 to 16 years, though the intensity of life on a car production line can shorten that timescale quite considerably.
Nevertheless despite this healthy rate of growth in the robot industry overall, Wilson also provides several reasons for treating it with a degree of caution - at least in the short term.The robot industry as a whole, he points out, is relatively immature.Robots have only been in really intensive use as industrial machines, he says, for less than 20 years, in fact maybe even as little as "ten to fifteen years."
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As such, says Wilson, the IFR's range of activities includes not just the compilation of statistics and organisation of conferences that might be expected, but also finding ways to assist in the development of robotics and to help expand the use of the technologies involved into new application and geographic areas.
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Appropriately the IFR has just set up a European sub-section for the service robot sector, which Wilson says will be extended to global coverage in due course.