Collaborative Robot

A lightweight robot arm designed to share workspace with people, without a safety fence.

A collaborative robot, or cobot, is a robot designed to work in the same space as people, most commonly a lightweight 6- or 7-axis arm with a payload from a few kilograms up to twenty or thirty. Traditional industrial robots must be kept behind safety fencing; cobots instead reduce the risk of hurting someone through power and force limiting, collision detection, meaning they stop instantly if joint current or torque sensors notice an unexpected contact, and speed-and-separation monitoring, with the relevant requirements set out in ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066. They typically support kinesthetic teaching, where a person drags the arm by hand to record a motion, which makes them easy to deploy and a common platform in small and mid-sized factory automation and in embodied-AI labs. Representative brands include Universal Robots' UR series, Franka, Dobot, JAKA, and Flexiv. Whether a setup actually counts as “collaborative” depends on a full risk assessment of the application, not just on swapping in a cobot arm.

ExampleThe UR5e has a 5 kg payload and can be hand-guided directly through kinesthetic teaching, making it one of the most common collaborative arms in research.

Also called

Cobot, Collaborative Arm

Related

Industrial Robot · Human-Robot Collaboration · ISO/TS 15066 Robots and Robotic Devices — Collaborative Robots · Power and Force Limiting · Kinesthetic Teaching · Universal Robots

Sources

Cobot - Wikipedia
ISO/TS 15066:2016 Robots and robotic devices — Collaborative robots