Robot maintenance for industrial robots, robotic cells and automated production lines where uptime, reliability, safety and long-term performance matter. Technical articles, maintenance insights and practical guidance from URT.
The robot stopping is only the start of the cost A robot cell downtime cost calculation becomes misleading when a plant counts only technician time or when production is missed while the robot remains stopped. A one-hour fault can affect operators, upstream equipment, downstream operations, work in process, quality checks, maintenance resources, and the time … Read more
The Real Question Is How Much of the Failure You Need to Cover A used robot backup can make more operational sense than a shelf of spare parts. This is especially true when a robot failure could stop a critical process, and the plant cannot predict which component will fail. Keeping a compatible robot can … Read more
Backlash Should Be Diagnosed Before It Becomes a Repeatability Problem Industrial robot backlash can first appear as a small positioning inconsistency that operators compensate for rather than report. A taught point needs adjustment, a tool approaches a fixture differently depending on its direction of travel, or a process that was previously stable begins requiring corrections. … Read more
Used robot operating hours can look like an objective way to compare two machines. The number does not explain how those hours were accumulated or what loads the robot handled. It also does not show whether maintenance was performed correctly or what mechanical condition the robot is in today. A lower-hour robot can therefore be … Read more
A spare industrial robot can look like expensive equipment doing nothing until a critical production robot fails. The real decision, however, is not whether an unused robot appears wasteful. It is whether the financial and operational exposure created by an extended robot outage is greater than the cost and complexity of maintaining a compatible replacement. … Read more
An industrial robot can be mechanically healthy and still become difficult to return to production if its industrial robot backups are incomplete. Before maintenance, controller work, relocation, or cell modification, the real question is not simply whether someone copied the robot programs. It is whether the plant has preserved enough information to reconstruct the operating … Read more
A robot can move smoothly during a test and still create problems once it returns to a die-casting cell. Buyers evaluating used die-casting robots need to look beyond basic motion. Mechanical wear, heat exposure, controller condition, tooling, and integration requirements all affect whether reuse makes sense. Die casting can expose equipment to heat, contamination, lubricants, … Read more
A clean exterior and a successful power-up do not tell you how a used industrial robot behaved during production. The robot alarm history can provide another layer of evidence by showing which faults were recorded, whether similar alarms occurred repeatedly, and which areas deserve closer inspection before a buying decision is made. Alarm history is … Read more
In many workshops, the same dilemma repeats itself: should you buy a new robot or modernize the one already installed? With advances in controllers, sensors, software, and mechatronics, older robots can be brought back to life effectively. The key is knowing when refurbishment makes sense— and when it’s time to replace. Why consider modernization? A … Read more
From the fear of depending on the integrator to true autonomy on the shop floor: “What if only they know how to make it work?” When an automation project is nearing its end, a silent concern often appears: “After the integrators leave, who keeps the knowledge?” It’s not a technical question. It’s a human question, … Read more