Definition of Collaborative Robots

Before we define collaborative robots, let's take a look at a term. Collaborative workspace: an area where robots and humans can work together; The so-called collaborative robot refers to a robot designed to directly interact with people in a collaborative area. Easy to use, flexible, and safe collaborative robots will be more suitable for the different production needs of small and medium-sized enterprises and global enterprises, which has become the main trend in the development of industrial robots.

So collaborative robots are essentially still industrial robots, not any new products, just positioned differently. Simply put, traditional industrial robots place more emphasis on accuracy and speed, while collaborative robots prioritize safe coexistence and easy operation.

Why do we need collaborative robots?

The deployment cost of traditional robots is high. At present, industrial robots are mainly responsible for repetitive work in factories, with high requirements for repeatable positioning accuracy, and rely on a fixed external environment. To ensure this, in addition to the design requirements of the robot itself, it is also necessary to clamp the product to be processed in a fixed position, so that the robot can walk to the same place every time and accurately pick up or perform a certain operation. This requires a significant amount of resources, valuable workshops, and several months of implementation time. At the same time, the use of traditional robots is difficult, and only trained professionals can proficiently use robots to complete configuration, programming, and maintenance. Ordinary users rarely have such abilities.

Industry statistics show that the cost of deploying the entire robot is approximately three to four times the price of the robot. In recent years, with the increase of domestic integrators and increasingly fierce competition, the overall price has decreased, but it is basically 2-3 times. In short, a single robot cannot be directly used on the production line of a factory, and it also requires the support of many peripheral devices. Although robots themselves are highly flexible devices, the entire production line is not. Once changes are made to the production line, the cost is very high.

A new car usually takes three to six years from launch to exit the market. During this period, if there are any changes, they are only for the purpose of appearance and internal maintenance. These changes generally do not affect the work of the robot (such as body welding, painting, and handling of main parts), so there is basically no need to move or redeploy the robot on the completed production line throughout its entire lifecycle. You only need normal maintenance. This not only utilizes the advantages of traditional robots, but also avoids the disadvantages of traditional robots.

However, small and medium-sized enterprises are different. Their products generally have the characteristics of small batches, customization, and short cycles. They don't have much funding for large-scale production line renovations and are more sensitive to the return on investment (ROI) of their products. This requires robots to have conditions that traditional robots cannot meet, such as low overall cost, fast deployment and redeployment capabilities, and simple usage methods. In addition, the 3C industry is a typical emerging industry, and even large enterprises face the same problems as small and medium-sized enterprises.