ABB, Fanuc and other robot companies are new trends, where is the future of collaborative robots?

As we all know, collaborative robots are an innovative category of industrial robots, which once came out of the circle with the advantages of safety and human-machine collaboration, and were quickly used in 3C electronics, semiconductors, automobiles, education and scientific research and other industries with the advantages of simple operation, strong flexibility and fast return on investment.

In some scenarios such as grinding and assembly, the application requirements for load, accuracy, and speed are not high, and many collaborative robots are also rapidly increased. However, as more and more collaborative robot companies hope to expand the application scope of products, the transformation and upgrading of the domestic manufacturing industry has deepened, and the characteristics of low load, slow speed and low repeated positioning accuracy of collaborative robots have gradually become problems in the actual application process of the manufacturing industry.

Generally speaking, increasing the load capacity of the robot will inevitably lead to an increase in its own weight, and an increase in running speed will lead to an increase in joint torque and affect safety. Therefore, the current mainstream collaborative robot load on the market is mainly less than 10 kg, which is very different from the industrial robot with a very wide coverage and a load from 0.5 kg to several hundred kg.

On the basis of maintaining the lightweight and safety advantages of collaborative robots, how to break through the shackles of load and speed has become an urgent problem for robot manufacturers at home and abroad. Under the pressure of demand, the prototype of industrial collaborative robots began to take shape, and gradually became a climate with the relay research and development of collaborative robot manufacturers.

Since 2015, ABB, Fanuc, Universal Robots and many other robot giants have launched industrial collaborative robots one after another, but the launch of new categories often requires huge manpower, material and financial resources, and at the same time, it is also necessary to face the uncertainty of the market reaction to new products, so there are not many companies that have launched industrial collaborative robot products so far. There is no consensus on what exactly is called industrial collaborative robots.

On the one hand, there are very few companies that have launched industrial collaborative robots in the industry, and on the other hand, every company that proposes a new concept is basically a giant in the robot industry, which is almost to a certain extent the vane of the development of the robot industry, and it is difficult to adopt a unified standard. Therefore, the Robot Lecture Hall tries to explore the future development direction of industrial collaborative robot products launched by several manufacturers.

1. Fanuc

The Robot Lecture Hall learned that the proposal of industrial collaborative robots can be traced back to 2015 at the earliest.

Fanuc, one of the four robot giants, launched a new collaborative robot CR-35iA with a weight of 990 kg and a load of 35 kg in 2015 when the concept of collaborative robots was just emerging, becoming the world's largest collaborative robot at that time. The CR-35iA has a movement radius of up to 1.813 meters, which can work in the same space with humans without safety fence isolation, which not only has the characteristics of safety and flexibility of collaborative robots, but also prefers industrial robots with large loads in terms of load, realizing the transcendence of collaborative robots. Although there is still a big gap between the size and weight of the cobot and the cobot, this can be seen as Fanuc's early exploration in industrial cobots.

With the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, the direction of Fanuc's exploration of industrial collaborative robots has gradually become clear. While increasing the load of collaborative robots, Fanuc also noticed the disadvantages of collaborative robots in convenient working speed and convenient advantages in body size, so at the Japan International Robot Exhibition at the end of 2019, Fanuc first launched a new collaborative robot CRX-10iA with high safety, high reliability and convenient use, with a maximum load of up to 10 kg and a working radius of 1.249 meters (its long-arm model CRX-10iA/L, The maximum movement speed is up to 1.418 m/s.

This product has been expanded and upgraded in 2022 to become Fanuc's CRX collaborative robot series, with a maximum load of 5-25 kg and a radius of 0.994-1.889 meters, which can be applied to various application scenarios such as assembly, gluing, inspection, welding, palletizing, packaging, machine tool loading and unloading. At this point, it can be seen that Fanuc has a clear direction for upgrading the load and working range of cobots, but the concept of industrial cobots has not yet been mentioned.

Until the end of 2022, Fanuc launched the CRX series, calling it an "industrial" collaborative robot, aiming to seize new opportunities for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. Focusing on the two product characteristics of collaborative robots in safety and ease of use, Fanuc has launched a full range of CRX "industrial" collaborative robots with the four characteristics of stability, accuracy, ease and economy by improving the stability and reliability of the products, which can be applied to the handling and assembly of small parts and other application scenarios, which can not only meet the needs of industrial users for collaborative robots with higher requirements for space, safety and flexibility, but also provide other customers with a high-reliability collaborative robot product.

2. ABB Robotics

In February this year, ABB grandly unveiled the new SWIFTI™ CRB 1300 industrial-grade collaborative robot, which many people believe may have a direct impact on the collaborative robot industry. But in fact, as early as the beginning of 2021, ABB added a new industrial collaborative robot to its cobot product line, and launched the fast and accurate SWIFTI™ with a running speed of 5 meters per second and a load of 4 kilograms.

At that time, ABB believed that the concept of industrial collaborative robots proposed by ABB was intended to bridge the gap between collaborative robots and industrial robots, combining the safety performance, ease of use of collaborative robots and the speed, accuracy and stability of industrial robots.

This technical logic determines that the industrial collaborative robot CRB 1100 SWIFTI launched by ABB is developed on the basis of its well-known industrial robot IRB 1100 industrial robot, the CRB 1100 SWIFTI robot has a load of 4 kg, a maximum working range of up to 580 mm, simple and safe operation, mainly to support the application scenarios in manufacturing, logistics and other fields to improve production efficiency, and at the same time help more enterprises to achieve automation. Xiaolu Zhang, Global Product Manager for ABB Cobots, said: "SWIFTI bridges the gap between cobots and industrial robots by enabling faster and safe collaboration with speed and distance monitoring. But how to make up for it, and in which scenarios it can be used, ABB has been exploring.

3.UR robot

In mid-2022, Universal Robots, the originator of collaborative robots, launched the UR20, the first next-generation industrial collaborative robot product, officially proposing and promoting the concept of industrial collaborative robots.

According to the Robot Lecture Hall, the highlights of the new UR20 launched by Universal Robots can be roughly summarized into three points: a payload of up to 20 kg, a new breakthrough in Universal Robots, a 50% reduction in the number of joint parts, a reduction in the complexity of collaborative robots, and an increase in joint speed and joint torque, and a further improvement in performance. Compared with other UR cobot products, UR20 adopts a new design, achieving a payload of 20 kg, a body weight of 64 kg, a stretch distance of 1.750 meters, and a repeatability of ± 0.05 mm.

Since then, Universal Robots has set the tone for the development of industrial cobots with small size, low weight, high payload, large working range and high positioning accuracy.

▍Launched the new SWIFTI™, ABB aims at the future robotics market

Using ABB's recent product launch as an example, we can unearth some new ABB insights into industrial-grade cobots.

At the beginning of 2023, ABB unveiled the new SWIFTI™ CRB 1300 industrial cobot, which it says has been continuously optimized in terms of load and speed.

By comparing the parameters of ABB's previous cobots, it is easy to see that the SWIFTI™ CRB 1300 has been improved in many aspects, such as robot payload, working range, operating speed, repeatability and protection level.

Specifically, if ABB's GoFa™ CRB 15000 cobot for high payloads is used as a reference, the SWIFTI™ CRB 1300 achieves a multiplier increase in many aspects with less than three times the weight of the body. Among them, the payload is increased by 2 times, the working range is increased by nearly 1.5 times, the repeated positioning accuracy is increased by 5 times, and the protection level is increased from dust accumulation and water splash prevention to dust ingress and water immersion resistance in a short time

If we take ABB's first industrial collaborative robot SWIFTI™ CRB 1100 as a reference object, it can be found that SWIFTI™ CRB 1100 has tried to achieve the advantages of high precision and high speed of industrial robots while taking into account the lightweight advantages of collaborative robots.

In summary, SWIFTI™ CRB 1300, as ABB's second attempt to develop industrial collaborative robots, has not only made in-depth attempts in the lightweight direction of collaborative robots, but also carried out the second development in the direction of high safety, high operability and high precision, high speed and high load of collaborative robots, realizing the effective combination of safety, flexibility and ease of operation of collaborative robots and high load, high speed and high load of industrial robots.

It is worth mentioning that in terms of safety, the SWIFTI™ CRB 1300 integrates additional protection measures such as a safety laser scanner with ABB's SafeMove Collaborative safety software and interactive status indicator to visualize the working status of the robot while maintaining the advantage of the cobot to ensure human-robot collaboration without the need to install protective fences or other physical barriers. And through the laser scanner detection, the robot will automatically decelerate and stop if there are workers in the operation area, and after the staff leaves, the robot will restart and resume full-speed operation.

Unlike industrial robots, which require complex programming to set up, users of the SWIFTI™ CRB 1300 can quickly set up safe work areas and other safety functions with the help of a hand-held teach pendant and the SafeMove software plug-in.

Many giants are favored, what is the definition of industrial collaborative robots?

After taking ABB as an example, we return to the concept of collaborative robots and industrial collaborative robots, and compare them side-by-side through parameters.

Before we compare, let's review the differences between cobots and industrial robots. Although collaborative robots are expanded from industrial robots, they have their own advantages in performance and strengths, and the differences are mainly in four aspects: ease of use, safety, operation accuracy & speed and load & weight.

In terms of ease of use, the installation of industrial robots in the factory to achieve normal operation requires code programming, and the user programming threshold is high, and special class training is required. Collaborative robots can generally simplify the deployment process through wireless teaching, graphical programming, drag-and-drop teaching, etc.

In terms of safety, generally speaking, traditional industrial robots are limited by technical and historical reasons when working, and in order to ensure safety, measures such as safety fences must be taken to exclude humans from the work area, while collaborative robots are known for safety since their inception and ensure safety through the safety integrity of the control system. For safety reasons, the running speed of collaborative robots is mostly low, controlled at 1/2 or even 1/3 of the operating speed of industrial robots.

In terms of operation accuracy, in order to reduce the kinetic energy of the robot when moving, most of the collaborative robots adopt an integrated joint design, and the control is a distributed control architecture, so most of the collaborative robots are lightweight, which leads to the lack of overall rigidity of the robot, and the operation accuracy has an order of magnitude gap compared with that of industrial robots.

In terms of arm span length, the arm span of collaborative robots is generally less than 1.2 meters, and the main interval is distributed in 0.6m-1.2m, coupled with its light load characteristics, which limits the application scenarios to light processing fields such as assembly, testing, and screwing, while the arm span of industrial robots is generally 0.62m-2.5m, and the load can reach dozens of kilograms and weigh up to several tons, so it is often used in welding, spraying, handling and palletizing and other fields.

So standing on this concept, we have made a table by integrating the products of the three companies:

ABB, Fanuc and other robot companies are new trends, where is the future of collaborative robots?

It can be found that in the field of collaborative robots, industrial collaborative robots have only launched a concept and have not yet formed a complete definition, but based on the product parameters of industrial collaborative robots released by Fanuc, Universal Robots and ABB, and the data of general collaborative robots and industrial robots, several head robot manufacturers have tacitly chosen to improve the self-weight ratio, running speed, repeated positioning accuracy and protection level, and safety design of industrial collaborative robots while lengthening the arm span.

As ABB envisioned when it launched the SWIFTI™ CRB 1300, industrial cobots are expected to fill the gap between industrial robots and cobots in the future, meeting the growing demand for automation in the industry, and expanding into high-growth sectors such as electronics, healthcare, consumer goods, logistics, and food and beverage.

Flexible? Ultra-lightweight? Cobot routes are becoming more and more differentiated

Boosted by the collaborative robot market, the number of collaborative robot manufacturers is gradually growing and developing, and the collaborative robot industry is also showing a trend of gradual segmentation. It's just that industrial collaborative robots have attracted the attention of the industry earlier by being boosted by a number of robot giants.

For example, as early as 2020, before the concept of industrial collaborative robots became popular, ROKASHI Robotics launched a new generation of flexible collaborative robots xMate six-axis to explore a new direction for the development of collaborative robots. For another example, Ruierman Intelligence, which was established as early as 2018, has focused on the research and development of ultra-lightweight humanoid robotic arms since its establishment. For another example, Changguangxi Intelligent Manufacturing, which was also founded in 2018, launched a "new generation of automotive-grade high-speed collaborative robots" to explore its own unique product path.

Different from the idea of improving the load and running speed of collaborative robots and creating industrial collaborative robots by robot giants such as Universal Robots, ROKAZ Robotics has focused on research in force control technology. Its xMate six-axis heavy-duty positioning accuracy can reach ±0.03mm, force control accuracy can reach 0.5N, xMate sensitive force feedback characteristics and unique collision detection, one-finger touch stop function, no need to install protective fences, to achieve safe human-machine collaboration.

xMate is a six-axis flexible collaborative robot launched by ROKASHI for the industrial field, which adopts direct force control technology with full state feedback, which takes into account the high dynamic force control and compliance control capabilities while ensuring high position accuracy. In addition, the deployment of xMate cobots is more flexible thanks to the integration of the xMate cobot without a control cabinet and the design of the built-in high-precision torque sensor in each joint with direct force control capabilities. As a result, ROKASHI's xMate flexible collaborative robot was able to quickly obtain IEC60601 medical access qualifications and enter the medical field, landing in medical scenarios such as joint replacement surgery, remote ultrasound, tumor puncture unit, etc., and reaching cooperation with more than 10 leading medical companies that develop surgical robots.

Different from ROKASHI, Reerman Intelligence has chosen a path that seems to be contrary to the development direction of industrial collaborative robots, and gradually moved closer to the service, consumer and industrial industries, trying to create an ultra-lightweight humanoid robotic arm with collaborative safety capabilities that can adapt to the human environment.

In terms of the convenience and flexibility of collaborative robots, Rayman Intelligence continues to improve. At present, in terms of the self-weight ratio of industrial collaborative robots, Ruierman Intelligence has been in a leading position. Through the innovative research and development of all core components, Ruierman Intelligent integrated the controller into the robotic arm, and launched an ultra-lightweight humanoid robotic arm with a self-weight weight of only 7.2 kg (including the controller) and a load capacity of up to 5 kg, and an ultra-lightweight humanoid robotic arm with a load-to-weight ratio of up to 1:1.44 to solve the problem of ultra-high requirements for the weight, volume, and wiring of the lifting platform on the mobile chassis of the inspection robot.

Thanks to the outstanding performance of the products, Ruierman's products have been applied in many fields such as medical laboratories, machine tool processing, new catering and new retail, logistics and warehousing, and robot education. In the future, with the development of robot technology, the robotic arm of Reilman may also appear as a human assistant in people's daily life to assist humans in household cleaning and other work.

Founded in 2018, Changguangxi Intelligent Manufacturing has developed and launched a "new generation of automotive-grade high-speed collaborative robots" that can be mass-produced and has strong performance in response to the common pain points faced by the collaborative robot industry, and has successively obtained China Robot CR, EU CE, semiconductor SEMI S2 and other certifications. As the only collaborative robot in the industry that has passed the IATF16949:2016 international automotive quality management standard, the "new generation of automotive-grade high-speed collaborative robot" launched by Changguangxi Intelligent Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has a maximum speed of 10-20% faster than similar products and 2-3 times the rigidity of similar products.

As the pioneer of "industrial control + process" intelligent manufacturing at the vehicle specification level, Changguangxi Intelligent Manufacturing has built a IATF16949:2016 international automotive quality management system, and combined with China Mobile's 5G + industrial Internet technology, it has jointly created an international cutting-edge intelligent manufacturing production model of "robot intelligent manufacturing robot" at the vehicle specification level. The "new generation of automotive-grade high-speed collaborative robots" launched by Changguangxi Intelligent Manufacturing has provided innovative robot solutions, products and services for FAW-Volkswagen, Hongqi, BMW, China Mobile, Huawei and other industry representative customers.

▍Conclusion

Where are cobots headed? We may not know that yet. However, it is very certain that with the market demand and the emergence of collaborative robot research and development enterprises, collaborative robots are maturing from the subdivision of industrial robots to the subdivision of their own categories.

Collaborative robots born in industrial robots and realize human-machine collaboration may also diverge out of manufacturing and industry, medical treatment, consumption, and people's lives with the company's thinking, and may eventually end up with industrial robots.

However, no matter where the collaborative robot goes in the future, its safe and easy-to-deploy characteristics will inevitably add a strong touch to the development of the robot industry.

ABB, Fanuc and other robot companies are new trends, where is the future of collaborative robots?

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