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Robotics is a subject that leaves nobody indifferent. No matter if they are used to work in industry or at our homes, mimic some of the human capabilities, or used to access dangerous environments, launched to space, or simply used to play with, robots are always a source of interest and admiration. Here the focus is in robots used to work on industrial environments [ 1 ], i.e., robots built to substitute man on certain industrial manufacturing tasks being a mechatronic coworker for humans.

This book focuses on industrial robotic manipulators and on industrial manufacturing cells built using that type of robots. This chapter covers the current practical methodologies for kinematics and dynamics modeling and computations. The kinematics model represents the motion of the robot without considering the forces that cause the motion. The dynamics model establishes the relationships between the motion and the forces involved, taking into account the masses and moments of inertia, i.e., the dynamics model considers the masses and inertias involved and relates the forces with the observed motion, or instead calculates the forces necessary to produce the required motion. These topics are considered very important to study and efficient use of industrial robots.

This chapter explains the basics of remote procedure calling using robot manipulators and industrial automation systems in general. The underlying idea here is to demonstrate how to set up and explore a basic facility for robot cell commanding and supervision operations, using the available network services. Consequently, a client-server model is adopted where the robot acts like a server exposing to the remote clients its remote services.

The success of using robots with flexible manufacturing systems especially designed for small and medium enterprises (SME) depends on the human-machine interfaces (HMI) and on the operator skills. In fact, although many of these manufacturing systems are semi-autonomous, requiring only minor parameterization to work, many other systems working in SMEs require heavy parameterization and reconfiguration to adapt to the type of production that changes drastically with time and product models. Another difficulty is the average skill of the available operators, who usually have difficulty adapting to robotic and/or computer-controlled, flexible manufacturing systems.

Industrial small and medium (SME) manufacturing companies face complex and challenging market conditions that may impact their organization and economic strength. In fact, for a manufacturing SME to remain competitive in the global economy, it must cope with the following basic characteristics of the market: Global competition — actual companies compete on a global scale and with products from all over the world, i.e., coming from very different economic realities in terms of organization, labor, social protection and security, etc. Their competitors are global companies that address the markets with specific objectives and strategies, making the competition very unpredictable. Demand for more quality at lower prices — customers want the continuous improvement of quality at lower prices, i.e., customers tend to evaluate the quality of the product/service obtained for the money spent in buying it. This puts big pressure on companies since the market offers other options for the same product or service, and customers are used to making comparisons using the quality/price ratio. Very complex products — many of the modern high-technology products are very complex to manufacture since they often are composed of many mechanical parts, electronic components, software modules, etc. This poses new challenges to manufacturing systems. Very short life-cycles and time-to-market periods — competition and continuous innovation tends to reduce the life-cycle of products, forcing companies to evolve their line of products more often and with higher levels of agility.

Dear reader, I hope you had fun reading and exploring this book, because in my opinion that is a fundamental outcome of a technical book. Furthermore, a book about robotics and automation must stimulate the reader curiosity and interest to explore further on its own.