Industrial Automation Magazine India

The ReBeL of automation Smarter igus Cobot for 4,970 euros

Published on : Tuesday 22-03-2022

With the worlds first cobot plastic gearbox and a digital ecosystem, igus accelerates low-cost automation – today already 20 projects per week.

Cologne, March 2022 – igus is now delivering the ReBeL service robot – also as a smart version. At a price of 4,970 euros for the plug-and-play variant and weighing only around 8 kilograms, customers receive one of the lightest cobots on the market. Digital services such as the RBTXpert and new online offerings enable customers to find complete automation solutions in just a few days and for little money.

With the ReBeL, igus relies entirely on its motion plastics expertise: The use of plastic makes the robot with a dead weight of 8.2 kilograms the lightest service robot with cobot function in its class. All mechanical components that make up the ReBeL are developed and manufactured by igus without exception. Its payload is 2 kilograms and has a reach of 664 millimetres. The repeatability is +/- 1 millimetre at 7 picks per minute. At its heart is the world's first industrial-grade plastic cobot gearbox. "Behind these figures are 1,041 tests in the in-house laboratory since 2019, in which we have carried out tribological and thermodynamic tests on 15 material pairings and tolerance chains. A particularly major challenge was the heat generation in the fully integrated shaft gearboxes; they are thermally influenced by the motor. In development, we have therefore also focused on larger motors and better efficiency in order to significantly reduce heat generation," says Alexander Mühlens, head of the Low-Cost Automation business unit at igus. "As a result, we were able to achieve continuous improvements and, in the end, even quintuple the number of cycles to two million. This corresponds to a usual service life of two years."

igus has also incorporated its motion plastics know-how into power electronics and, for the first time, has developed an encoder with the help of conductive plastic sheets. In this way, the number of rotations and cycles, runs, temperature and current can be measured exactly. Thanks to a cloud connection with webcam, a dashboard clearly displays all generated data live. This gives the customer full transparency about his ReBeL in operation, about key figures such as wear, cycle time and quantities.

The smart ReBeL is available in two variants: one as an open-source version without robot control, power supply and software for 3,900 euros with quantity 1 or as a plug-and-play version with robot, control software and power supply for 4,970 euros for quantity 1. According to the igus "Build or Buy" approach, in addition to the complete system, customers also have access to the individual ReBeL shaft gearboxes, in diameters of 80 and 105 millimetres. The torque is 3 Nm (80) and 25 Nm (105) respectively at 6 RPM, with a ratio of 50:1. The ReBeL is available on the online marketplace RBTX. Here, users will find individual components, integration support as well as hardware and software from more than 40 partners – knowing that everything is 100 percent compatible with each other; including a wide variety of robot kinematics, cameras, software, grippers, power electronics, motors, sensors and controls.