Renishaw

Renishaw is a British metrology group, not a robot maker. It is known for the touch-trigger probes it brought to machine tools, and for encoders, measurement systems and additive-manufacturing technology. According to the maker's own description its solutions serve aerospace, automotive, electronics, machine building, healthcare and scientific research. Robotics is reached by two routes: encoders in joints, and measuring the accuracy of the machines themselves.

It is only fair to say what we do not have. We have no datasheet for any Renishaw product aimed at robots, so we quote no specific resolutions, accuracies or ranges. We rely on what the maker states in general terms and on the data of its subsidiary, described in a separate entry on RLS. Anyone who needs numbers should go to the maker's documentation rather than rely on our summary.

Why does a metrology company belong in a component catalogue at all? Because a robot's accuracy is not only the quality of its gearbox but also how well we know where the arm actually is. A joint encoder reports shaft position; calibrating the whole machine corrects geometry errors, deflection and mounting tolerances. An industrial robot that must place a tool to a fraction of a millimetre depends on both layers. For welding and machining robots the gap between repeatability and absolute accuracy can be decisive, which is worth remembering when you read “How to Read a Robot Datasheet”.

For a robot's cost and capability the effect is indirect. A good encoder and calibration do not change the list price of an arm, but they affect whether cobots such as the Franka Research 3, with torque sensors in every joint, hold their stated precision in service. Likewise, strain-wave gears from Harmonic Drive or cycloidal gears from Nabtesco are only as good as the position feedback paired with them. In “Actuators in Humanoid Robots” we describe how encoder, motor and gearbox combine into one actuator, and “Degrees of Freedom (DOF) in Humanoid Robots” shows how many such joints a typical robot has.

The interested audience is factories and metrology labs rather than end buyers purchasing a finished robot. For Polish integrators, whether the supplier provides measurement and calibration on the customer's site usually matters more than the brand itself. We have not confirmed whether Renishaw has an official representative or distributor in Poland; that has to be checked with the maker directly.

It helps to know the company's background. According to its website, founder Sir David McMurtry invented the touch-trigger probe while working on Concorde engines, an invention said to have "revolutionised precision engineering". Today Renishaw also offers additive-manufacturing technology and the Renishaw Central platform for collecting and acting on real-time metrology data. For plants robotising quality-control lines, it is often the measurement data rather than the robot itself that carries the most value: the robot moves the part, and the measuring system tells you whether it is within tolerance.