Industrial Insight

At Advanced Energy, our teams uniquely partner with our customers to develop and deliver highly engineered, cutting-edge power, sensing and control solutions that drive emerging applications forward. In this Industrial Insights newsletter, we feature new resources on robotics applications, an important growth market to AE. Whether it's tethered drones, fixes robotics, or automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), we are proud to power these emerging applications. We welcome your partnership as we continue to push beyond the limits we know today and find new ways to constantly and reliably power innovation. 

- Maria Cortez, Senior Vice President, Industrial Power Products, Advanced Energy

For years, the automotive industry was considered the primary driver for the application of industrial robots. These large and expensive robots were mainly used in the body shop for welding and subsequent painting. However, this has fundamentally changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the ongoing shortage of human labor, a smaller and simpler generation of robots, called collaborative robots or cobots, have emerged in many applications and industries. Cobots are designed to work alongside humans and are equipped with changeable end of arm tooling to carry out tasks like parts assembly, machine tending, bonding, or quality inspection. Based on payload capacity and speed, their power consumption typically stays below 1,000 watts. Cobots used in manufacturing plants, operate in multiple shifts with high reliability and low operating costs, ideal for end users.

AE’s highly reliable AC/DC power supplies -like for example the LCM series with 300 to 3,000 watts output power- help leading cobot manufacturers like Universal Robots to meet those criteria. With up to 93% full load efficiency and overload protection, it is well suited to power the cobot, providing a stable DC bus in the control unit.