Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm

A four-axis industrial arm that's flexible horizontally but rigid vertically, built for fast pick-and-place assembly.

SCARA is an industrial robot configuration proposed in the late 1970s by Hiroshi Makino at the University of Yamanashi in Japan. The typical structure has two vertically axed rotary joints that swing the arm within a horizontal plane, plus a vertical linear axis and a rotating end axis, for four degrees of freedom in total. The “selective compliance” in the name refers to the arm being somewhat compliant horizontally but very rigid vertically, which makes it well suited to inserting parts straight down into holes. Compared with a 6-axis arm, its workspace is smaller and its motion more constrained, but it's fast, repeats positioning very precisely, and is cheap — so it's widely used for pick-and-place work on a flat plane, such as electronics assembly, dispensing adhesive, and sorting.

ExampleSCARA robots are commonly used on phone-motherboard lines to pick up small components and insert them straight down into the circuit board.

Also called

Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm, Planar Articulated Robot

Related

Industrial Robot · 6-Axis Robot Arm · Pick-and-Place · Robotic Assembly · Cartesian Robot · Delta Robot

Sources

Wikipedia: SCARA