The manufacturing materials of industrial robots have a lot to do with the use of the environment, and usually need to withstand greater work pressure, so the choice of manufacturing materials is relatively harsh. Manufacturing industrial robots choose more metal materials, metal materials are relatively strong, not easy to wear, but metal materials in the light weight improvement space is limited. The commonly used metal material for manufacturing robots is aluminum alloy, with a smaller proportion of stainless steel, and aluminum alloy is more convenient to process than stainless steel.
In robot manufacturing, ABS resin, PVC, nylon, plexiglass and other materials are sometimes used, compared with aluminum alloy, stainless steel and other metal materials, the advantages of such materials are mainly light weight, easy to process, but the strength is relatively small, can be applied to some non-stressed parts of the robot. In addition, glass fiber or carbon fiber robot accessories have developed rapidly in recent years, and the application potential is huge. Carbon fiber robot accessories are a new type of fiber material with high strength and high modulus and carbon content of more than 95%. Carbon fiber robot accessories "outside soft inside rigid", mechanical performance is outstanding, the tensile strength is several times that of steel, the density is only 1.7g/cm^3, for aluminum 2/3, in the national defense military and civilian aspects are important structural materials, has been included as a strategic new material industry "Made in China 2025". Carbon fiber accessories have many excellent properties, its specific strength and specific modulus in the existing structural materials is very high, electrical conductivity between non-metal and metal, thermal expansion coefficient is very small, vibration absorption energy performance is good, in organic solvents, acids, alkali insoluble does not expand, corrosion resistance outstanding. Compared with traditional glass fiber, the Young's modulus of carbon fiber accessories is more than three times its, and about twice that of Kevlar fiber. The following is the performance comparison data between carbon fiber accessories and metal materials: Carbon fiber accessories based on epoxy resin can not only play the characteristics of light weight and high strength of carbon fiber accessories themselves, but also have practical significance of material designability, so it has gradually become a new generation of lightweight materials for industrial robot robot arms.