collaborative robot
In plain wordsA robot designed to work safely right next to people without a safety cage, for example by moving gently and stopping at once if it bumps into someone.
A robot built to work alongside people in the same space, sometimes in deliberate physical contact with them, without the fences that separate traditional industrial robotsindustrial robot, n.: A programmable robot arm used in factories for jobs such as welding, painting, assembling and moving parts, traditionally working inside a safety cage. from workers. Safety rests on methods set out in the ISO 10218 robot-safety standards, whose 2025 edition absorbed the technical specification ISO/TS 15066: hand guiding; speed and separation monitoring, which slows or stops the robot as people approach; and power and force limiting, which caps contact forces and pressures at thresholds derived from human pain tolerance for different body regions. Earlier editions also counted a safety-rated monitored stop as a collaborative mode. Cobots are typically lightweight arms with rounded surfaces, joint torque sensing and back-drivable actuatorsactuator, n.: The 'muscle' of a machine: a motor or similar device that turns electrical, hydraulic or air power into movement, such as turning a robot's joint or closing its gripper.; they are easy to program by demonstration and are used for machine tending, screwdriving, packaging, inspection and laboratory automation. Payloads and speeds are lower than those of caged robots, and the safety of an installation depends on the tool, part and task as much as on the arm.
We put a cobot at the end of the line to palletize boxes while the operator prints labels.
Origin
Coined at Northwestern University, where J. Edward Colgate and Michael Peshkin built 'cobots' in 1996 in a General Motors-funded project on assisting assembly workers; the name came from a lab naming contest won by Brent Gillespie. Universal Robots' UR5 (2008) is often cited as the first commercially successful cobot arm.
Usage note
Standards bodies increasingly treat collaboration as a property of the application rather than the robot: a 'collaborative' arm holding a blade is not safe. The 2025 revision of ISO 10218 accordingly drops 'collaborative robot' in favor of 'collaborative application'.
Related
- industrial robotindustrial robot, n.: A programmable robot arm used in factories for jobs such as welding, painting, assembling and moving parts, traditionally working inside a safety cage.
- human–robot interactionhuman–robot interaction, n.: The study of how people and robots communicate, cooperate and share spaces, and of how to design robots that people find safe, understandable, trustworthy and pleasant to live or work with.
- impedance controlimpedance control, n.: A way of controlling a robot so that it behaves like a spring and shock absorber when it touches things, giving way gently instead of pushing rigidly.
- actuatoractuator, n.: The 'muscle' of a machine: a motor or similar device that turns electrical, hydraulic or air power into movement, such as turning a robot's joint or closing its gripper.
- end effectorend effector, n.: The tool at the end of a robot arm that actually touches the world, such as a gripper, suction cup, welding torch, paint sprayer or robotic hand.
- teleoperationteleoperation, n.: Controlling a robot or machine from a distance, with a person steering it in real time using a joystick, a matching 'puppet' arm, a VR headset or a screen.
- industrial robotindustrial robot, n.: A programmable robot arm used in factories for jobs such as welding, painting, assembling and moving parts, traditionally working inside a safety cage.
Sources
- Colgate, J. E., Wannasuphoprasit, W. & Peshkin, M. A. (1996). Cobots: Robots for collaboration with human operators. Proc. ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress, DSC-Vol. 58.
- ISO/TS 15066:2016. Robots and robotic devices — Collaborative robots. International Organization for Standardization.
Mentioned in
industrial robotindustrial robot, n.: A programmable robot arm used in factories for jobs such as welding, painting, assembling and moving parts, traditionally working inside a safety cage., Rodney BrooksRodney Brooks, prop. n.: An Australian-American roboticist who argued that intelligence grows out of acting in the world rather than abstract reasoning, and who co-founded the company behind the Roomba vacuum., human–robot interactionhuman–robot interaction, n.: The study of how people and robots communicate, cooperate and share spaces, and of how to design robots that people find safe, understandable, trustworthy and pleasant to live or work with., impedance controlimpedance control, n.: A way of controlling a robot so that it behaves like a spring and shock absorber when it touches things, giving way gently instead of pushing rigidly.