Welding-robot manufacturer Nanosystec relies on HepcoMotion’s guidance system

How a welding robot moves distances in the nanometre range

Can a robot move distances which are as small as 100 nanometres? Hard to imagine, considering that a human hair is 700 times thicker. One of Nanosystec’s welding robots shows that it is possible. Behind its precision is a guidance system from linear motion specialist HepcoMotion.

Every day billions of people communicate by email and telephone. All over the world data is usually transmitted at the speed of light using fibre optics ­– a concept which is now familiar. Less familiar on the other hand are E/O converters. These components, the size of sugar cubes, make data transmission possible by using laser diodes to convert a telephone microphone’s electromagnetic pulses into optical pulses and dispatching them into the fibre optics. Their manufacture is a small masterpiece of precision welding. This requires special devices which are only designed by a small number of manufacturers around the world. And Nanosystec is among them. The company is based in Groß-Umstadt near Frankfurt am Main and has developed a welding robot called NanoWeld which is marketed mainly in the USA and the Far East.