70%. Collaborative Robots. Why Haven't They Hit The Big Time Yet?

When it comes to the whole robot field in China, which kind of robot is developing fastest, so far, it has to be cooperative robot.

China's collaborative robots have shipped 14,372 units in the vertical sector this year, accounting for 32.2 percent of the global market.

Such performance, in the overall downturn of the international robot market, is bound to be a good result.

The swift horse has to match Bole, a large number of capital has turned to the cooperative robot market early, expecting to share this trillion big cake.

However, although the cake is big, it has not yet been shaped. It seems that there is still a long way to go before the cake is big and done well.

Collaborative robot is in focus, because it is the most special, able to interact directly with people, with the characteristics of safe and easy to use, man-machine collaboration, coincided with the tide of reform demand side, which meet the current "small batch and many varieties, customized" higher request to the flexibility of robot, well adapted to the current market,

Ushered in the development of small climax.

Collaborative robot, many manufacturers gathered

At the beginning, traditional industrial robot manufacturers did not seem to attach importance to collaborative robots. The old UR occupied the main market for a long time. With the change of production environment, ABB, Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric gradually launched their own collaborative robot products, showing the new layout of collaborative robots.

At the same time, there are plenty of new entrants to the homegrown collaborative robot industry.

Public data shows that the Chinese market, ao, primus, siasun, eli, tide, the xinjiang science and technology, the card and other domestic brands, have been able to occupy about 70% of the share, optimal proud once fell to only 20% share of the robot, and at that time, entrepreneurs and investors with the collaborative robot will often collaborative robot as a good choice.

The favour of capital and optimistic market performance, further encouraging collaborative robot, coupled with rising labor costs in China, the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry, macro trends such as collaborative robot market is increasing year by year, and the outbreak of the catalytic, collaborative robot to develop more application scenarios, in addition to the traditional industries, on the demand for consumer products also presents a wide range of growth.

From 2015 to 2025, the compound growth rate of conventional industrial robots and collaborative robots is 8.4% and 56.5%, respectively, according to IFR data.

Fully embodies the power of collaborative robotics.

It has also attracted a large number of businesses to the track.

The bottleneck of collaborative robots

Although cooperative robot has occupied a large number of markets with its unique advantages, cooperative robot is not a panacea. It is a relatively new category in the field of robotics, emerging in demand.

However, the existence of advantages also causes disadvantages. For safety reasons, speed and weight must be sacrificed to reduce collision loss. Therefore, the speed of cooperative robot is actually difficult to achieve high speed, the load is also relatively limited, and the repetition positioning accuracy is lower than that of traditional robot.

Therefore, we often say that cooperative robots are suitable for small workpiece processing, in fact, the characteristics of cooperative robots can only handle light tasks.

Of course, emerging markets are bound to have both opportunities and challenges.

The arrival of entrepreneurship wave has also caused the problem of talent reserve. There is a lack of experienced talents in research and development, products and production. In addition, there are not many schools and experts in the research of mechanical arm in the past.

It is not enough to provide expert-level or even "skilled" collaborative robot technicians in a short period of time. The progress of the whole industry from the start to the development, after stepping out of the starting line to accelerate, it has encountered a bottleneck.

In addition, another bottleneck of collaborative robots lies in the "old difficulty" of the whole robot field -- core components.

The joint integration of collaborative robots is very high, so even a small difference in one part will cause a big change in overall performance.

Core parts problem is a bigger problem for collaborative robot, because collaborative robot not only need a lot of traditional robot parts, there are a lot of unique components, such as direct driving motor, modular encoders, torque sensors, safety control and so on, therefore, the core components are "stuck" neck, also became a barrier restricting collaborative robot.

Of course, cost is also the main advantage of collaborative robots, including the cost of product deployment and return on investment (ROI), which is a matter of ratio, what price collaborative robots to deploy, what value of jobs to replace, and how long customers can recover as soon as possible, are all up to each enterprise.

UR once said that the ROI is about 6 months, and the current return on investment cycle of most domestic cooperative robot enterprises is about 1 year. Therefore, it is necessary to find the most appropriate pricing deployment scheme to expand the penetration rate and shipment of cooperative robots.

To create a point of explosion, lies in highlighting the focus

Like creating popular tweets and products, to break through bottlenecks, collaborative robots should not only make up for their weaknesses, but also seize and expand their advantages, so that customers can fully benefit from their advantages.

We always emphasize overtaking on corners, changing cars on corners, but only if you have a good car and drive it well.

At present, the cooperative robot market, many players, homogeneous products everywhere, we have always been committed to explore and foreign gap is becoming smaller and smaller (gap still exists), and then come to the conclusion: China's cooperative robot development rapidly, have the potential to catch up.

However, the whole domestic market is slightly chaotic, which directly leads to the difficulty of distinguishing between real and fake customers. Once bad money drives out good money, the whole industry will go backwards.

Frontier technology determines the upper limit of products, cooperative robot with the characteristics of safety, easy to use "out of the circle", should play this card, deep cultivation of collaborative robot technology, rather than deliberately emphasize the popularity of market segments, to the collaborative robot packaging into omnipotent image.

The scene suitable for the layout of collaborative robots has been very broad and huge, at the present stage, do this position, is the beginning of the explosion point.