ST R17HS High Speed Robot Arm (credit: ST Robotics)
ST Robotics has launched the new ST R17HS, a high-speed version of their five-axis vertically articulated R17 robot arm. The ST R17HS is said to be one of the fastest robots in the industry with standard tool speed more than four times as fast as the closest competitor, but still offered at less than half the price.
Compare the R17HS to the UR5:
UR5 - $35K 1 m/sec
R17HS - $18K 4 m/sec
The ST R17HS is built with sophisticated brushless servomotors and has a repeatability of 0.2 mm, an effective reach of 750 mm, and a maximum speed after acceleration of 480 °/second in the robot's elbow, waist, hand, and wrist, with a shoulder speed of 300 °/second.
The R17HS is the result of years of development that puts us ahead of the field. Customers are finding it useful for high throughput production as well as testing applications requiring fast motion of test devices.
David Sands, President and CEO of ST Robotics
The $18,640 package price of the ST R17HS includes the R17HS robot arm, the latest K11R controller, smart teach pad, RoboForth II software, simple interfacing with other equipment, manuals, cables, unlimited free technical support, and a two-year warranty.
Options include electric, pneumatic, and vacuum grippers, and expandable I/O. As with all ST Robotics products, the excellent manuals and support offered make setting up and programming amazingly simple.
This incredibly strong, self-contained, industrial robot system can be unpacked and programmed within a few hours, yet it can perform extremely intricate tasks. Applications include sample handling, testing, and machine feeding. The mean time between failures (MTBF) is 10,000 hours and usually over a million cycles.
Another cost-saving version for $16,690, is the R17HSW, a high-speed waist version of the R17 (five-axis) for applications that do not need much speed in a vertical direction but have long X-Y distances needing long waist moves.
ST Robotics, extensively known for 'robotics within reach,' has offices in Princeton, New Jersey and Cambridge, England as well as offices in Asia. One of the first manufacturers of bench-top robot arms, ST Robotics has been providing easy to program, lowest-priced, ready-to-go, boxed robots for three decades.
ST's robots are utilized around the world by institutions and companies such as Lockheed-Martin, NASA, Motorola, Amazon, MIT, Honeywell, Pfizer and Sony. The various applications for ST's robots benefit the manufacturing, pharmaceutical, nuclear, semiconductor, and laboratory industries.