According to a recent report from Markets and Markets — Collaborative Robots Market by Payload Capacity, Industry, Application and Geography: Global Forecast to 2023 — the collaborative robot (cobot) market is expected to grow by almost 57% per year between 2017 and 2023, when it will be worth $4.28 billion.

The report says this growth is partly attributable to the “high return on investment rates and the relatively low price of cobot technology that is driving demand among small to medium-size enterprises”.

The market for cobots with payloads of 10kg and over is expected to grow the fastest to satisfy demand from the automotive, electronic and machining sectors. A relatively new entrant to the market is Doosan Robotics, which has recently appointed Leamington-based Mills CNC (www.millscnc.co.uk) as its UK and Irish distributor.

Peter McCullough at Mills CNC said: “Cobot technology is developing at a rapid pace. Improvements in the human-machine interfaces on the latest cobots make them easier to use, while the use of advanced sensor technology means that they are inherently safe.”

Assembly and ‘pick and place’ applications were the two largest markets for cobots in 2016, when the automotive industry had the largest share of the global cobot market, with applications that included assembly operations, as well as production line ‘pick and place’, quality inspection, packaging, palletisation, machine tending and other material-handling tasks.

Mr McCullough said: “We are ideally positioned to capitalise on the demand for higher-payload cobots. The Doosan Robotics range currently has two cobot systems — M1013 and M1509 — with payload capacities of over 10kg and reach capabilities of 1.3 and 0.9m respectively.”