What is a collaborative robot? Simply put, a collaborative robot is a type of robot designed from the outset to reduce the risk of injury and safely engage in direct interaction/physical contact with humans. Traditional industrial robots are limited by technology and historical reasons when working, and in order to ensure safety, certain measures need to be taken to exclude humans from the work area. For example, welding, painting and other processes in automobile factories do not require human participation at all, so safety fences/gratings can be used to enclose them. However, in many jobs that require human intervention, robots cannot be used to achieve a high degree of automation. The purpose of collaborative robots is to combine the precise repeatability of robots with the unique skills and abilities of humans. Humans excel at solving imprecise/fuzzy problems, while robots have advantages in accuracy, strength, and durability.

There is not much difference between collaborative robots and traditional robots, but industrial robot products produced based on different design concepts. In the early stages of collaborative robot development, many were modified from traditional robots.

There are two main reasons for the emergence of collaborative robots:

1. The market demand is increasing, the 3C industry is rising, and the demand for automation is growing among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); The current robot technology still lacks intelligence and flexibility, and many tasks require human intervention;

2. Small space occupation is not one of the reasons for choosing collaborative robots, it is just a result of collaborative robots achieving safety. Currently, medium and large robots are unable to achieve conventional cooperation (of course, the so-called human-machine cooperation is actually divided into four modes, and medium and large robots can theoretically achieve three of them, but it is different from the cooperation similar to UR and Swayer that most people recognize). The suitable scenarios for collaborative robots are those that require human intervention, mostly involving assembly/assembly.