Out: Co-workers. In: Co-bots?

Many manufacturers are using co-bots to assist their human workers, as well as relieving them of ergonomically unfavourable work. Workers are typically redeployed to higher value tasks that robots cannot do, which require more skill and understanding, or retrained to manage the robots.

Robot makers, such as Spanish company PAL Robotics, are also developing moving co-bots. Rich Walker, managing director of Shadow Robots, a British SME that makes robot hands, believes these will further boost take-up of co-bots. “I think that these will bring real change, because they offer the possibility of acting in many different places as they can move from one location to another so they can fetch something and use it,” he says…

But despite the excitement over human-machine collaboration, sales of co-bots are a small proportion of the 179,000 industrial robots sold each year. The majority of robot sales still continue to be the traditional, large caged machines.