Adept Technology
Encyclopedia
| Type | Public Public company This is not the same as a Government-owned corporation.A public company or publicly traded company is a limited liability company that offers its securities for sale to the general public, typically through a stock exchange, or through market makers operating in over the counter markets... |
| Slogan | Your Intelligent Robotics Partner |
| Founded | 1983 |
| Location |  PleasantonPleasanton, California Pleasanton is a city in Alameda County, California, incorporated in 1894. It is a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area located about east of Oakland, and west of Livermore. The population was 70,285 at the 2010 census. In 2005 and 2007, Pleasanton was ranked the wealthiest middle-sized city in... , California California California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area... , USA |
| Industry | Robotics Robotics Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots... , Industrial Automation |
| Market cap | 46 million USD |
| Employees Employment Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :... |
158 |
| Key people | John D. Dulchinos |
| Website Website A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet... |
www.adept.com |
Pleasanton, California
Pleasanton is a city in Alameda County, California, incorporated in 1894. It is a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area located about east of Oakland, and west of Livermore. The population was 70,285 at the 2010 census. In 2005 and 2007, Pleasanton was ranked the wealthiest middle-sized city in...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
(San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
). The company focuses on industrial automation and robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...
, including software and vision guidance. Adept has offices throughout the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
as well as in Dortmund
Dortmund
Dortmund is a city in Germany. It is located in the Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia, in the Ruhr area. Its population of 585,045 makes it the 7th largest city in Germany and the 34th largest in the European Union....
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, and Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
. Adept is publicly traded on the U.S. NASDAQ
NASDAQ
The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...
under the sticker symbol .
Company history
Adept was founded in 1983, and was formerly the West Coast Division of Unimation, which became part of WestinghouseWestinghouse Electric (1886)
Westinghouse Electric was an American manufacturing company. It was founded in 1886 as Westinghouse Electric Company and later renamed Westinghouse Electric Corporation by George Westinghouse. The company purchased CBS in 1995 and became CBS Corporation in 1997...
after being a division of Consolidated Diesel Electronic (Condec) for many years. However, its roots go back almost 10 years earlier, when company founders Bruce Shimano and Brian Carlisle, both Stanford
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
graduate students, started to work with Victor Scheinman
Victor Scheinman
Victor Scheinman is a pioneer in the field of robotics. He is a graduate of the now-defunct New Lincoln High School in New York. In the late 1950s, and while in high school, Scheinman engineered a speech-to-text machine as a science fair project...
at Standford's AI lab.
Today, the company is active in a variety of industries requiring high speed, precision part handling including food handling, consumer product and electronics, packaging, medical and lab automation, automotive, as well as emerging markets like solar manufacturing.
Robots
In 1984, the company introduced its first product, the AdeptOne SCARASCARA
The SCARA acronym stands for Selective Compliant Assembly Robot Arm or Selective Compliant Articulated Robot Arm.In 1981, Sankyo Seiki, Pentel and NEC presented a completely new concept for assembly robots. The robot was developed under the guidance of Hiroshi Makino, a professor at the University...
robot. The simplicity of the mechanism, based on direct-drive motors, made AdeptOne robots very robust in continuous industrial automation applications, while maintaining high accuracy. AdeptOne robots continue to be in use worldwide in 2009.
Around 2004, Adept introduced table-top SCARA robots called the Adept Cobra i600/i800, with the system and servo controls, and the power amplifiers, embedded in the base of the robot. The related Adept Cobra s600/s800 models employ an external controller (with the servo controls and amplifiers still in the robot base) to achieve greater system functionality. These robots are claimed to be the fastest robots in their class.
In 2006, Adept released its new delta-4 robot, the Adept Quattro. It is based on a new concept of delta-style robot mechanism that has four arms versus the traditional three-arm design. The rotation is achieved through a parallel platform.
Adept also offers Adept Python linear-module robots with one to four axes in various configurations, and six-axis Adept Viper articulated robot
Articulated robot
An articulated robot is a robot with rotary joints . Articulated robots can range from simple two-jointed structures to systems with 10 or more interacting joints....
s.
Software & Vision
On the software side, Adept continues to develop its powerful robotic language, V+. Even though V+ does not have the full capabilities of a general-purpose OS, it does offer a variety of tools aimed at manipulating robot arms. For example, functions relating to transformation and frames: one can command the robot to move to a position relative to a conveyor belt, and track the position as the belt moves, with a single instruction:MOVES %belt:pos
Vision guidance, first introduced with the AdeptOne robot, was further developed and now contains a powerful object finder, vision inspection, blob finder, etc. enabling vision-to-robot calibration.
In 2008, Adept released its new software platform called Adept ACE. Adept ACE is an application development software environment that allows a user to program a robotic application.
Hardware and Software History
Adept has its own robot control operating system, V+, which has come to version 17.x by 2009. The history of V+ dates back to the days of Unimation. At the time it was called VAL (Victor's Assembly Language), which evolved into VAL-II and VAL-III later. After the formation of Adept, the rights to parts of the OS were granted to Adept..The Adept OS at that time was called V, and it ran on the refrigerator-sized controllers that were based on the MultiBus technology. Around 1986 the Adept MC controller was introduced; while still based on the MultiBus, it was smaller than the original controller. After the Adept MC controller (around 1990), came the Adept MV controller, which was based on the VME backplane technology. Then around 2000 the SmartController CS/CX controllers were introduced, which are current production as of 2009.
Along with the changes of the controller itself, the servo controls also saw major improvements over the years. Around 200x, with the V+ version reaching ver. 14, the servo amplifier and controls were part of the robot, and hence separated from the main robot controller itself. This is when distributed controls
Distributed control system
A distributed control system refers to a control system usually of a manufacturing system, process or any kind of dynamic system, in which the controller elements are not central in location but are distributed throughout the system with each component sub-system controlled by one or more...
were introduced by the company. The idea of having the amplifier and servo controls in the base of the robot was named AIB (Amplifier in Base). Adept still follows the AIB mantra, and has an AIB in the latest robot, Adept Quattro, reducing the footprint of the robot/manipulator/controller system.
Controls
The Adept core business continues to be motion control. Its SmartController CX integrates motion controller, vision guidance, and interfaces to factory networks.External links
References: ABB, Fanuc, Denso
DENSO
is a global automotive components manufacturer headquartered in the city of Kariya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Established December 16, 1949 as , in 1996 the company became DENSO Corporation worldwide...
, Epson Robots
Epson Robots
EPSON Robots is the robotics design and manufacturing department of Japanese corporation Seiko Epson, the brand-name watch and computer printer producer.EPSON manufacture Cartesian, SCARA and 6-axis industrial robots for factory automation...
, KUKA
KUKA
KUKA is a leading German producer of industrial robots for a variety of industries - from automotive and fabricated metals to food and plastics...