Collaborative Robots for Industry

Executive Overview

In 1920, Czech science fiction writer, Karel Ĉapek, coined the term “robot,” but actual industrial robots didn’t appear in plants until General Motors started experimenting with them in the 1950s. Since then, industrial robots have moved into production facilities around the world. But due to both technical and regulatory constraints, collaborative robots (“cobots”) designed to work safely side-by-side with human workers didn’t start appearing on the factory floor until about ten years ago.

Rather than replace human workers, cobots are designed to support them by performing heavy lifting, repetitive, or otherwise unpleasant and/or difficult tasks. However, cobots can also perform certain tasks with greater precision and repeatability than humans. Compared to traditional industrial robots, cobots also tend to be easier to program or train to perform different tasks. This makes them well-suited for today’s Industrie 4.0 and smart manufacturing models, which require significantly increased flexibility to accommodate smaller production runs, mass customization, and even one-off products. Finally, since cobots do not need to be enclosed with elaborate safety cages to protect human workers, they also tend to take up a lot less valuable “real estate” on the production floor.

For these, and other reasons, ARC Advisory Group believes that we’ll see exciting new applications emerge as cobots continue to proliferate on the factory floor and other industrial environments.

Collaborative Robots for Industrial Applications

Today, industrial robots have become increasingly important for automation and digitization in discrete manufacturing plants. Along with additive manufacturing (3D printing), robotics is a key technology for transferring digital designs to the physical world. In general, different types of industrial robots are characterized by their supported motions (or “kinematic chain”), workspace requirements, speed, and payloads. But, as a whole, all industrial robots can be referred to as “freely programmable kinetic auto-mats.” The Japan Robot Association (JARA) subdivides these kinetic auto-mats into groups, three of which are of primary interest for this report: numerically controlled robots, which can be freely programmed; playback robots, which save the motion sequence demonstrated by the human operator; and flexible, self-adapting, intelligent robots.