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Robot Benchmarking

Selecting the right robot for your application can be difficult, most suppliers and integrators are inevitably biased in favour of the platform they sell. As a multi-platform integrator, Active8 Robots is skilled at benchmarking, helping you choose the best robots for your application.

What is benchmarking?

Most technical fields use benchmarking in one way or another. It is used both directly, to test our solutions against those of others, and indirectly, when deciding which new technology to buy.

Benchmarks give us a clear indication of whether a technology or solution is suitable for your needs. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of benchmarks in robotics for a while now. Task based benchmarks are even more uncommon.

Task-based benchmarking

So why is Task-Based Benchmarking so uncommon in robotics? In part it’s because of the lack of a benchmarking culture within the robotics industry, but it’s also due to the fact that robotic tasks are so complex.

There are a few ways to measure the performance of a robot. Different areas of robotics will have different benchmarking needs; there is a great difference between industrial and collaborative robots.

Task based bench marking can be thought of as a sort of “benchmark for the real world”. They give a better understanding of how a robot performs. Performance metrics are both helpful and necessary, however they wouldn’t be able to answer the question “will this robot be able to assemble my product?” and that’s exactly the question we are looking to answer throughout our automation consultations. Luckily, as we are not biased towards any one solution, we can ask this question in relation to all the robots available to us and see which can complete your task in the most efficient way.

Collaborative robots bring with them even more challenges for task-based benchmarking. Not only do the benchmarks for these robots need to test performance, they should also test its safety features and abilities to collaborate. Although the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are currently developing a set of benchmarking protocols for collaborative robots that is due to be completed this year, until then, it is down to us to benchmark our own robots.