Adept Technology

Infobox_Company
company_name = Adept Technology, Inc.
company_
company_type = Public (NASDAQ|ADEP)
slogan = "Your Intelligent Robotics Partner"
foundation = 1983
location = flagicon|USLivermore, California
industry = Robotics, Industrial Automation
homepage = [http://www.adept.com/ www.adept.com]

Adept Technology, Inc. is a multinational corporation with headquarters in Livermore, California (San Francisco Bay Area). The company focuses on industrial automation and robotics, including software and vision guidance. Adept has offices throughout the United States as well as in Dortmund, Germany, Paris, France, and Singapore. Adept is publicly traded on the U.S. NASDAQ under the sticker symbol (NASDAQ|ADEP).

Company History

Adept was founded in 1983, and was formerly the West Coast division of Unimation, part of Westinghouse. However, its roots go back almost 10 years earlier, when company founders Bruce Shimano and Brian Carlisle, both Stanford graduate students, started to work with Victor Scheinman at Standford's AI lab.

Today, the company is active in a variety of industries requiring high speed, precision part handling including food handling, consumer product and electronics, packaging, medical and lab automation, automotive, etc.

Technology

In 1984, the company introduced its first product, the AdeptOne SCARA robot. The simplicity of the mechanism, based on direct-drive motors, made them very robust in continuous industrial automation applications, while maintaining high accuracy.

Around 2004, Adept introduced a table top SCARA robot called the iCobra with the controls and amplifier embedded in the base of the robot. It is claimed to be the fastest robot in its class.

In 2006, Adept released its new parallel picker robot, the Adept Quattro. It is based on a new concept of picker/delta style robot mechanism which has four arms versus the traditional three-arm design. The rotation is achieved through a parallel platform.

oftware & Vision

On the software side, Adept continued to develop its powerful robotic language, "V+". Even though "V+" did not have full capabilities of a general OS, it did offer a variety of tools aimed at manipulating robot arms. For example functions relating to transformation and frames: one can command the robot to move to a position relative to a belt and track it with a single instruction:"MOVE pos:%belt"

Vision guidance, first introduced with the AdeptOne, was further developed and now contains a powerful object finder, vision inspection, blob finder, etc. enabling vision to robot calibration.

Hardware and Software History

Adept has its own robot control operating system V+ which has come to version 17 by 2008. History of V+ dates back to the days of Westinghouse and Unimation. At the time it was called VAL (Victor's Assembly Language), which evolved into VAL II and VAL III later. After the formation of Adept the rights to parts of the OS were granted to Adept (THIS FACT NEEDS TO BE CHECKED). The OS at that time was called V and it ran the refrigerator sized controllers which ran on the Multi Bus technology. Around 199x the MC controllers were introduced which were smaller than the Multi-Bus controllers. After the MC controllers came the MV controller which was based on the VME backplane technology. Then around 200x the CS and CX controllers were introduced which is what is current as of 2008. Along with the change of the controller itself the servo controls also saw some major improvements. Around 200x with the V+ version reaching ver. 14 the servo amplifier and controls were part of the robot and hence separated from the the main robot controller itself. This when the distributed controls were introduced by the company. The idea of having the amplifier and servo controls in the base of the robot was named AIB (Amplifier in Base). Adept still follows the AIB mantra and has AIBs even in the latest robot, Adept Quattro, reducing the footprint of the Robot/Manipulator.

Controls

Adept core business remains to be motion control. Its SmartController CX integrates motion controller, vision guidance and interfaces to factory networks.

References

* " [http://www.robothalloffame.org/06inductees/scara.html Carnegie Mellon Hall of Fame] "
* " [http://www.learnaboutrobots.com/industrial.htm Learn about Robots: Industrial Robots] "
* " [http://www.adept.com www.adept.com] " Company Website

References: ABB, Fanuc, Denso, Epson Robots, KUKA