The smart factory of the future will be created by the harmonious coexistence of man and machine, which requires robots to be able to work together with humans and complete different tasks together with them. This includes tasks that humans cannot do, do not want to do and cannot do well, as well as complex tasks that can reduce human labour and improve the quality of human life. It is for this reason that human-machine collaboration can be seen as a necessary attribute of new industrial robots.

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What is a collaborative robot?

Collaborative robots, as the name suggests, are where robots and people can work together on a production line, giving full play to the efficiency of the robot and the intelligence of the human. Such robots are not only cost-effective, but also safe and convenient, and can greatly contribute to the development of manufacturing companies.

As a new type of industrial robot, collaborative robots remove the barriers to human-machine collaboration, allowing robots to completely escape the confines of a guardrail or cage, and their groundbreaking product performance and wide range of applications open up a new era in the development of industrial robots.

In today's world, all major developed countries are competing to develop and improve new technologies to make intelligent manufacturing techniques more widely available for greater economic benefit. With the advent of the smart manufacturing era, the use of flexible manufacturing systems will become increasingly widespread, and the application of intelligent collaborative robots to industrial production will certainly become an industry trend.

It's hard to imagine a scene where a worker is on one side of a work platform and a robot on the other, and they work together skilfully and communicate smoothly, like a pair of partners who have been working together for years, communicating intimately and working **. The advent of collaborative robots is making this possible.

Small and compact, collaborative robots overcome the clumsiness and sluggishness of traditional industrial robots, enabling them to move from the cage (here it is mainly the traditional industrial robots that require safety protection when working, usually with a protective net that separates each robot from the staff at a safe distance) to the human world, especially the new generation of intelligent collaborative robots that can also become human right-hand men.

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In summary

The characteristics of collaborative robots are as follows -

1. Lightweight: makes the robot easier to control and improves safety.

2. Friendliness: ensuring that the robot's surfaces and joints are smooth and flat, with no sharp corners or crevices that could easily pinch the operator.

3. Perception: sensing its surroundings and changing its behaviour in response to changes in the environment.

4. Human-robot collaboration: sensitive to force feedback, stops immediately when a set force is reached, eliminates the need for protective fences after risk assessment and allows the human and robot to work together.

5. Easy to program: easy to program and commission for the average operator and non-technical background.