Motion stages with moving motors can provide greater performance than traditional recirculating belt drives with static motors.

A wide variety of industries operate factories with large-format manufacturing lines, creating a need for long-travel motion axes and transfer robots. Some of these gantry and Cartesian robots can reliably traverse distances of 50 meters or more as they transfer materials and parts around aerospace, automotive, prefabricated construction and other large scale factories.

Cartesian robots with the right design upgrades can take over manual transfer operations with ease

Manufacturing and packaging operations that still depend on manual material or parts handling operations can reap immediate benefits from a type of automation based on long-travel Cartesian robots with custom end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) and advanced sensing capabilities. These robots can support a variety of machines — performing otherwise manual tasks such as machine tending or transferring in-process parts — making long-travel Cartesian transfer robots a major upgrade to processes and operations.

If you build machines, you probably work with actuators and positioning stages every day. But do you truly get the best performance or lowest cost of ownership from these motion devices? The answer may not be what you expect.

All too often, engineers think of stages or actuators as a just another item on the bill of materials. As long as the motion device nominally meets the desired positioning, force, payload, speed and cost requirements, it’s good to go.