The Fine Line Between Industrial Robots And Collaborative Robots

The fine line between Industrial Robots and Collaborative Robots.

The simplest way to understand how Industrial robots and Cobots differ is that Cobots are designed to work alongside human employees while Industrial robots do work in place of those employees. A cobot can assist employees with work that may be too dangerous, strenuous, or tedious for them to accomplish on their own, creating a safer, more efficient workplace without eliminating factory jobs involved in the actual fabrication of a product. This in turn frees up employees for more meaningful tasks that are less exciting and are less prone to repetitive motion injuries.

Cobots are more easily programmable than Industrial Robots because they are capable of learning on the job. A person can simply re-program cobot by moving the arm along the desired track. And then a cobot is capable of learning on its own. While if we talk about Industrial Robots then they can not so easily re-programmable and require an engineer to write fresh code to update the required changes in the process to be implemented.

And not only this, infact Cobots are not used for heavy manufacturing because of their size and need to work close to humans. They are safe enough to work around people and don’t require much safety infrastructure. While Industrial Robots can handle heavier, larger materials and are also able to require safety cages to keep humans out of the workplace.

A very good example of a Collaborative Robot is Rethink robotics ‘Sawyer’ which creates a lot of excitement around the industry over the last few years.