Unlock next-level productivity with cobots

For today’s manufacturing companies, cobots offer numerous benefits that add value at every stage of the production process.

Their ability to work safely with people without the need for physical shielding makes them ideal for continuous and intermittent collaboration applications where users want to maximize productivity without compromising safety.

Cobots also provide flexibility to manage the transition to low-volume, high-mix production because they can be swapped between products and be programmed to work with new products quickly and easily. With humans and robots working side by side, companies can benefit from combining the problem-solving, insights, and adaptability of human operators with the tireless precision and consistent performance provided by robots.

Big potential, small size

The global collaborative robot market was valued at USD 1.23 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32.0% between 2023 and 2030.* Analysis suggests that this growth is being driven by a combination of two factors.

First, cobots are becoming more accessible to SMEs in terms of price and ease of use. While robotic automation technology has evolved to meet the growing demands of high-volume industrial production, it has also led to the emergence of smaller collaborative robots, such as ABB’s YuMi® and GoFa™ cobots, which are designed to fit easily into existing production lines, thanks to flexible mounting options. With their smaller size and reduced reliance on peripherals, collaborative robots can also reduce the investment needed for a robotic work cell to less than $50,000 in many applications.

Second, technological advances are enabling robots to take on more diverse applications. For example, ABB’s cobot welding package uses a GoFa cobot with a simplified, automatically generated program selection tool to allow users to create welding sequences in less than 30 seconds. By eliminating the need for a teach pendant, the package reduces programming time by 70 percent and eliminates the need for operators to have prior robot experience.

Fill the talent gap

Many manufacturers struggle to recruit experienced workers. Many young people who grew up in a digital world see manufacturing as dirty, boring, dangerous, and repetitive. Furthermore, with shorter product life cycles, small manufacturers operating in high-labor countries can’t simply outsource tasks to low-cost countries, as large corporations do. In such conditions, collaborative robots not only reduce the need for manual labor, but can work tirelessly to deliver higher quality, allowing companies to deploy workers to higher-level tasks that better utilize their skills.

Get started right away

The plug-and-play capabilities of modern cobots mean they can be installed much faster, minimizing disruption to production processes. Their small size and portability make them suitable not only for automating existing production lines, but also for a wider range of applications.

Advances in technology have made collaborative robots much more intuitive than their conventional counterparts. Features such as guided programming and a user-friendly touchscreen interface enable operators without programming experience to quickly program the robot. Offline simulation tools such as ABB’s RobotStudio® also allow operators to simulate the application on a computer, allowing them to develop and refine the robotic installation in a virtual environment without affecting real-world production processes. This helps reduce the time it takes to get the robot up and running, ideal for organizations with short production cycles.

Innovation for the future today

More and more companies are turning to the opportunities offered by robotics in general and collaborative robots in particular as a way to augment their workforces. These opportunities are likely to increase as robot manufacturers and their partners work to develop enhanced software features, such as cloud connectivity, artificial intelligence and machine learning, that further enhance their functionality and make them even safer, more flexible and easier to use.

For more information, visit https://bit.ly/ABB_Collaborative.