What you can learn with the delta robot
What a delta robot is
Three motors fixed to the base drive three light arms linked to the platform by parallelograms. The platform therefore always stays horizontal and the moving mass is minimal. That is why a delta reaches accelerations of 10 g or more and makes over 150 picks per minute: it is the typical robot of food packaging.
Closed-form inverse kinematics
For each arm, the elbow must be one forearm length away from the platform point. This leads to an equation A·cos θ + B·sin θ = K, solved with atan2 and acos. No iterations: the controller computes it thousands of times per second.
Conveyor tracking
The robot never sees the part directly: the camera detects it earlier and the conveyor encoder tells how far it has moved since. The controller computes where the part will be when the suction cup arrives (interception) and, while the vacuum builds, follows it at conveyor speed.
Standard 25/305/25 cycle
Manufacturers compare their robots with one cycle: rise 25 mm, travel 305 mm, descend 25 mm and come back. At 10 m/s and 10 g, a delta does it in about 0.3 s round trip. The real figure depends on the product: what really limits it is how firmly the suction cup holds the part.
Vision and inspection
The same image guides the robot and checks quality. Broken parts are not picked and carry on to the reject bin. If you switch inspection off, the robot packs them and they reach the customer.
Throughput and losses
The parts per minute the line achieves depend on the robot’s cycle time, the spacing between parts and the size of the picking window. A short window or a fast conveyor leaves little time: the robot starts losing parts even if in theory it has capacity to spare.
Safety
A delta moves too fast to share space with people: it works inside a closed guard with interlocked doors. Opening a door triggers safe torque off (STO) and stops the conveyors.
Other robots in the lab: KUKA arm · SCARA · Cartesian · Cobot · Kinematics. More simulators in Labs. Educational simulator: the figures are representative and do not replace the manufacturer’s documentation or the risk assessment of a real installation.