Surf and Code: Industrial Robotics & Solid Edge 1

Industrial Robotics revolutionized the way goods were manufactured in the early years of the 20^th century. Henry Ford, the visionary inventor and industrialist, first implemented the technique of assembly lines in the manufacturing of the famous beetle car with the Ford-T engine.
	The same technology is used even today with much more sophistication added to it. The advancement of computers and CAD technologies especially Solid Edge from UGS during the same period has, however, eased the process of designing, visualizing and implementing such automated processes generally termed as Industrial Robotics.

How Solid Edge Helps in Industrial Robotics

Solid Edge is Windows based and 100% Windows compliant. This means you can use the best of CAD features coupled with the power of spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel.
A spreadsheet program is a number crunching machine. Lots of mundane calculations can be carried out using MS Excel. Also, the additional benefits of a tabular structure are readily available with MS Excel.

Solid Edge has a very powerful feature called Sensors. The CAD world witnessed a major technological leap forward with the introduction of Sensors in Solid Edge.
A sensor can be visualized as your sixth sense. With sensors, the output of a CAD is no longer a dumb model with little or very less information that is contained in it like its size, shape, surface area, Center of Gravity, etc.

Solid Edge models can now inform about any of their aforesaid properties in a synchronized manner. This essentially means, a model can be asked to keep the designer informed about its properties without the designer having to go out and inquire their changes manually.
This intelligence can be built into a Solid Edge model using the new Sensor functionality. Additionally, value added properties like cost of a model can also be relayed during the design process.

Combining the power of an Excel spreadsheet and the functionality of Sensors, it becomes extremely easy to design, visualize and implement an automated industrial robot.
The following workshops runs you through the complete process on how to link Solid Edge model with an Excel spreadsheet and discusses how a Spray Paint Robot can be simulated using this technique.

Part 2...