Citation
Loughlin, C. (1998), "Robots clean up", Industrial Robot, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.1998.04925aaa.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 1998, MCB UP Limited
Robots clean up
Robots clean up
Dirty, dull and dangerous are terms that certainly cannot be applied to this issue's theme "cleanroom robots". Suddenly the tables are turned, no longer are we sending robots into environments that could hurt people, but instead are sending in robots where people could harm the environment.
Everything about a cleanroom is right for robots. The wafers themselves are made with sub-micron precision, there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. If anywhere is "robot world" then this is it. Robots may appear awkward and useless in many environments of "our world" but in the cleanroom it is us that are dirty, dull and dangerous.
In what other application areas are people a similar threat to procedures? There is a lot of talk around the theme of miniature mechanisms. Apparently subminiature paramedics will soon be seeking out cancer cells and neutralising them with routine efficiency. Perhaps that will some day be the case but I will be surprised if I see it. However there are still several orders of mechanism magnitude that are relatively unexploited and for which applications will surely be found.
Until battery technology makes substantial progress petrol and gas have a much higher weight to energy content. The only problem is the size and weight of the turbo-charged, six cylinder, multi-valve energy converter currently required to turn the fuel into electricity or mechanical movement.
Miniature petrol engines about the size of a sugar cube are very much a possibility and these could drive a generator or charge a conventional battery that may still be required to satisfy peak energy demands. what is more, "recharging" the "battery" could simply be a matter of clipping in a new cartridge.
Whether the above example becomes fact or remains fiction is almost immaterial. The important consideration is that the possibilities are getting smaller all the time. And as mechanisms become smaller they will need to be assembled by machines and not by people. Making a robot with micron resolution is one thing but if the gripper is still the size of a monkey wrench it will not be much use in this miniature world. Robots will almost certainly be a major enabling technology for these miniature mechanisms (semiconductor technology is the other), but they may not be robots as we know them.
Clive Loughlin