IMTS 2024: Incumbents and Upstarts Scramble to Unlock the Market Potential of Cobots

The International Manufacturing Trade Show (IMTS) acts as a barometer for gauging end-user sentiment toward robotics innovation. The event played host to many legacy industrial robotics Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)—each demonstrating its latest innovations—alongside upstarts and disrupters showcasing the potential future of manufacturing automation.

Many of the robotics solutions on display were geared toward small-to-medium sized manufacturing facilities—a larger addressable market than the robotics-inundated heavy industrial manufacturing sub-sector. the event was awash with collaborative robots (cobots), a form factor offering advantages in safety, price, and usability (often at the cost of speed and precision). Kawasaki Robotics launched its cobot line in North America at the event. Also joining the cobot race were Rethink Robotics and Standard Bots—the two companies are U.S.-based, a marketing boon when targeting native manufacturers. Other vendors offering cobot product lines included Hanwha, Han’s Robot, Techman Robot, and Universal Robots (UR), along with KUKA, FANUC, Nachi, and Yaskawa. ABI Research’s recent forecasts see cobot shipments increasing to 330,000 shipments per year by 2030, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 31%.

An abundance of cobots begs the question of where these robots—fundamentally less capable, in terms of speed and precision, than their industrial cousins—offer value within the manufacturing vertical.

In the near term, a large and stable use case for cobots is machine tending. Loading and unloading Computer Numerical Control (CNC) is already a popular application for both industrial and collaborative robots. IMTS displayed robot machine tending solutions in great numbers. For example, Hurco (a CNC machine vendor) has entered this race with its ProCobots venture. ProCobots provides a robot-agnostic solution for CNC machine loading and unloading. Hurco’s IMTS stand featured UR, FANUC, and ABB robots. Similar setups could be found throughout the show, with FANUC—via its partner network—being a popular hardware provider for customized robotics applications throughout the manufacturing space. Further, many UR partners—several present at the event—pioneer low-cost solutions for machine tending and quality control.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a valuable technology for augmenting robots and will likely be instrumental in furthering cobot uptake. Several IMTS show stands demonstrated novelty AI applications, including cobot magic tricks, cobot blackjack, and cobot bartending—many leveraging Machine Vision (MV), but using pre-programmed paths. Other companies showcased the practical value of AI with “scan to path” robots for tasks such as sanding, deburring, and welding. Startup Augmentus was a standout in this regard. Using a Three-Dimensional (3D) scanner to map a surface, Augementus’ software would then generate an optimal robot path to perform the required task (scan to path). Yaskawa and FANUC also had strong AI showings. Yaskawa had a demo of MOTOMAN NEXT, an industrial arm performing crowded bin picking. The robot robustly picked out objects from bins of heterogeneous types. MOTOMAN NEXT uses an NVIDIA Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Isaac Manipulator to provide an adaptive picking solution. AI plays two roles here: first, MV classification algorithms are used to identify the right object, then Manipulator is used to perform robot arm path planning and gripper angle and behavior. FANUC also demonstrated the application of Machine Learning (ML) applied to robot arms in the form of dexterous and crowded bin picking at a rapid pace. The solution used vision-based classification algorithms and generated paths for the correct picking angle. The two approaches differ: the size and shape of the objects MOTOMAN NEXT had to manipulate varied significantly, whereas the FANUC solution acted on uniform objects. Algorithms like these will create vast value for cobots, but consistency and engineering support remain obstacles to overcome.

The peripherals of manufacturing will offer the most opportunity for innovation. Machine tending coupled with inspection significantly reduces human labor, while improving the quality of goods. Using cobots for end-of-line operations is a labor saver in heavy industrial manufacturing.

Within small manufacturing facilities, cobots have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to provide skilled (but code-illiterate) workers with a mechanism for automating tasks. Key examples of this are Smooth Robotics and OnRobot—both UR partners. This methodology will achieve significant market penetration by bridging labor shortages, while demonstrating the viability of skills transfer between workers and robots.

ABI Research’s “Industrial and Manufacturing Survey 1H 2024” sought to capture the technology needs and desires of manufacturing stakeholders across North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. When asked “How important are the following criteria when evaluating a new solution or vendor” 75% stated that a low-code/no-code solution is somewhat important to essential; respondents felt more strongly about AI with 90% answering that any new solution must be underpinned by AI; and 70% felt that users coming to grips with a solution in a matter of hours was important to essential. Cobots, either out-of-the-box or via value adds, can address all these needs, indicating that vendors exposing manufacturers to cobots will be a successful strategy. Indeed, end-user demand exists, but competing with established industrial deployments would be a mistake.

Established OEMs (KUKA, FANUC, and ABB) are enjoying success with collaborative product lines by finding an addressable market among their existing customer base—manufacturers that have used a specific OEM’s hardware for decades, exhibiting loyalty to that brand. This will rapidly become a saturated market. Within a production line already heavily automated with industrial robots, cobots are limited to end-of-line processing. Industrial robots have been designed for optimal throughput, repeatability, speed, and precision; generalist cobots are unfit to replace other dedicated machines. This is an equalizing factor between established OEMs and collaborative upstarts: to grow, they need to break into new markets. Partnerships and AI augmentation are critical to achieving this.

Cobots are the flagship form factor for robotics democratization. With the aid of safety, permissive regulation, lower prices, and intuitive programming interfaces, cobots are poised for significant market capture. This includes the encroachment into new verticals, including hospitality, agriculture, and healthcare. Focusing on skills transfer—augmenting skilled workers with robots without the burden of knowing how to program them—will lead to the next wave of robotics adoption. Intuitive programming paradigms, programming by demonstration, and even the incorporation of Large Language Models (LLMs) would give manufacturers what they want.