Epson Flexion N2

The Flexion N2 is Epson's answer to a problem that has nothing to do with speed or payload: the space an industrial arm wastes behind itself. A conventional six-axis robot swings its elbow out and up, so the cell has to be built around a working envelope far larger than the part being handled. The folding arm design, which Epson introduced in 2016 and calls a world first, gives each of the first three joints a full +/-180 degrees of travel, letting the arm double back over its own base and keep its extremities inside the footprint of the cell. The payoff is measured in floor space and cycle time rather than in headline numbers. The N2 reaches 450 mm to the wrist centre, 532.2 mm to the mounting face, and lifts 1 kg rated and 2.5 kg maximum - modest figures next to Epson's own C4. What it does not give up is precision: repeatability is +/-0.020 mm on every axis, the tightest in the company's six-axis range and the same as the far larger C8. The arm weighs 19 kg, has brakes on all six axes and mounts on a table or a ceiling. Joint travel is +/-180 degrees on J1 to J3, +/-195 on wrist roll, +/-130 on wrist bend and +/-360 on wrist twist; the motors are deliberately small, 100 W on each main axis and 15 to 30 W in the wrist. Epson opened Japanese orders on 21 June 2016 at 1,900,000 yen and brought the machine to the American market under the Flexion name on 21 February 2017. The arm runs on an external RC700-series controller programmed in Epson RC+ 7.0, offers 15 electrical user lines, an RJ45 Ethernet pass-through and two 6 mm air lines, and is rated for 5 to 40 degrees Celsius. It is a fenced industrial robot rather than a collaborative one, declared to CE, ANSI/RIA R15.06-1999, JIS B 8433 and EN ISO 13849-1. A decade after launch it is still listed in Epson's current six-axis catalogue.

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