Collaborative Robots: co-workers 4.0

Since the origins of automation, fear has gripped society: that the day will come when robots will take over all available jobs. Advances in recent years in robotics and artificial intelligence are showing that people can obtain enormous benefits from these innovations: soft talents are increasingly applying themselves to obtain value from the business and automated tools prevent human beings from having to perform very complex tasks. physically demanding or directly risky for your health.

In this context, the so-called cobots or “collaborative robots” emerge. This is a key piece for the Industry 4.0 paradigm: robots that can carry out activities imitating human behavior with remarkable precision. From a physical point of view, they can be described as small mechanical arms to automate industrial processes that generally require the participation of people.

By their nature, they are used in shared spaces: they have the ability to interact with their human coworkers, they are easily programmable (in many cases, no code knowledge is required to make them work) and an operator can easily “train” them with a few steps. In addition, they have artificial vision technology to “see” the behavior of their human colleagues.

Without fear of risk

Although initially its use was concentrated in some specific industries, such as electronics or automotive, it is expected that its use will expand as its effectiveness continues to consolidate and new use cases appear. According to the statistics portal Statista, the size of the market today stands at around US$700 million, a figure that could rise to US$1,990 million by 2030.

Among the qualities of cobots, they are usually light, compact and flexible, so that they can be easily adapted to different working conditions. Although its most frequent presence today occurs in factories and workshops, it increasingly tends to appear in mines, oil facilities or laboratories. Due to their versatility, they are also ideal for moving, transferring and accommodating heavy items in warehouses and distribution centers.

One of its main applications is the performance of tasks that involve some type of risk for human operators: work in spaces with hostile temperatures or with some type of contaminating element, tasks in wells or at heights, manipulation of sharp elements, fire or chemical elements, movements that require extreme force...

Caring for humans

Among others, they have security elements to prevent operators from suffering any type of incident in their interactions with them. For example, through sensors they can determine the presence of a person and slow down their movements or avoid moving to certain areas so that there are no injuries.

Another benefit is that they carry out operations with such precision that they reduce waste in production processes, with consequent savings in raw materials or intermediate products. They also increase profitability, since their ability to perform a task at maximum speed reduces production cycle time.

Collaborative robots, in conclusion, not only increase efficiency, reduce costs and increase productivity in everything related to repetitive, tedious and dangerous processes, but also reduce work accidents and absences due to illness: the terror imparted by the science fiction that robots could be a threat to humanity transmuted into this reality in which not only do they not harm us, but they even take care of us in the workplace.