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The first SCARA robot was created as a revolutionary prototype in 1978, in the laboratory of Professor Hiroshi Makino, at Yamanashi University in Japan. The 4-axis SCARA was designed as no other robot arm at the time. Its simplicity was brilliant … with less motion it could do more, with high speed and precision.
The acronym SCARA stands for Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm. The robots themselves may vary in size and shape but all SCARA arms are consistent in a unique 4-axis motion. SCARA excels in “pick and place”… in its unique ability to pick up industrial components from one location and place them in another, with precision, speed, and smooth motion.
The SCARA arm behaves somewhat like the human arm in that joints allow the arm to move vertically and horizontally. However, the SCARA arm has limited motion at the wrist; it can rotate but it cannot tilt. The limited motion of the wrist is advantageous for many types of assembly operations, such as pick-and-place, assembly, and packaging applications.
SCARA robots were introduced to commercial assembly lines in 1981 and still offer the best price/performance ratio regarding high speed assembly. The Japanese flexible assembly system, based on the SCARA robot, created a worldwide boom in small electronics production, creating products which drove the economy and changed the world forever.
Dr. Matthew T. Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, praises SCARA as a ground-breaking industrial robot,
“ SCARA mirrors the ‘design for assembly’ movement in automated manufacturing, capitalizing on the additional simplicity that is possible for properly engineered products, and enabling the inexpensive modern electronic products that we now take for granted.”
SCARA, for the ground-breaking simplicity of your original design, which created high- speed automated assembly never before possible … and resulted in the mass production of small electronic products that have transformed the human world … we welcome you, SCARA, the Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm, to the Robot Hall of Fame.
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