Robotics and automation

The seventh entry is o volume de trabalho, and an English reader who takes it word by word ends up with a sentence about how busy somebody is. « Volume of work » in English means the amount of work waiting to be done, and « workload » says it in one word. That is not what this is. O volume de trabalho is a volume in the geometrical sense: the region of space the arm can actually reach, a lumpy solid shaped by the segment lengths and by how far each joint turns, with hollows in it where the hand cannot go at all. The sentence on this page, A peça está fora do volume de trabalho, says that the workpiece is out of reach, not that it has been left off a schedule. English keeps two names for the thing and neither of them is « volume »: on the shop floor it is the work envelope, or the working envelope, borrowed from the flight envelope of an aircraft — the outer limit of what a machine may safely do. So read volume here as a shape, and say envelope when you carry it back.