Collaborative Robots 2025-2045: Technologies, Players, and Markets

Collaborative robots, a type of lightweight and slow-moving robot designed to work next to human operators without a physical fence, has gained significant momentum thanks to their flexibility and the initiatives of bringing humans back to factories, industry 5.0, made in China 2025, and many announcements from leading companies of reducing carbon footprint.

 

Collaborative robots (cobots) are ideal options for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) thanks to their low costs, small footprint, ease of programming, flexibility, and low power consumption. As the large companies aim to bring people back to their factories, cobots are expected to be increasingly adopted. Further, the advancement of AI, such as machine vision and voice recognition, enable additional functions and remote software updates of cobots. Traditional industries such as the automotive industry where cobots can be used for assembling dashboard components, polishing surfaces, welding, and screwing, have been the primary cobot applications. Cobots can also be used for other industries and tasks such as food and beverage, semiconductor and battery quality inspection, packaging and palletizing, and machine tending. IDTechEx's report on "Collaborative Robots 2025-2045: Technologies, Players, and Markets", takes a deep dive into the applications and industries including car assembly, surface polishing, screwing, injection molding, PC processor inspection, phone chip inspection, phone assembly, wearable device assembly, PCB assembly, packaging, and Li-ion battery industry. The report also conducts an in-depth analysis of the key enabling technologies, players, and markets with granular market size and volume forecast over the next 20 years.

 

 

Cobots have found usage across many industries. The technology and market readiness levels of cobots in these industries differ, and IDTechEx has summarized the level of maturity of cobots across different industries and tasks.

 

The automotive industry is the most prominent application of cobots. Cobots can be used for multiple tasks including car assembly (e.g., welding, assembling dashboards, etc.), surface polishing, and screwing. With the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, many existing car product lines need retrofitting or reconstruction. One of the pain points of automotive OEMs is that if one industrial robot malfunctions, the entire production line risks getting shut down to ensure human operators can safely enter the robot working zone for inspection. This process leads to a significant downtime cost. For instance, it takes around 90 minutes to produce a Tesla model 3 at the Fremont factory, so if the production line is down for a few hours, then it will lead to a huge loss. To mitigate these potential issues, cobots can be the ideal solution as they can work closely and flexibly with human operators despite that they cannot fully replace industrial robots for heavy-duty tasks. Meanwhile, large automotive manufacturers (e.g., Audi, Volkswagen, etc.) have proposed "intelligent factories" plans where they aim to enhance the flexibility of their production by improving human-robot interaction. IDTechEx forecasts that the market size of cobots in the automotive industry will grow at a CAGR of 22% over the next 20 years.

 

 

Further to the automotive industry, cobots also pose potential in other industries such as food and beverage where cobots are used for high-mix low-volume production for improved flexibility. At this stage in 2024, most of the packaging is still done manually. Although the food and beverage industry has historically not been the primary target industry for cobots, IDTechEx noticed that more cobot makers would start to use a long-tail strategy and make increasing efforts in the food and beverage industry for the next 20 years. Despite the significant market potential, IDTechEx has seen challenges such as limited budget from companies in these industries, limited technical capabilities and lack of understanding of the payback time. To mitigate this challenge, some cobot OEMs have proposed a cobot-as-a-service model where users can try first and buy later. More details are included in the "Collaborative Robots 2025-2045: Technologies, Players, and Markets" report.

 

The report also covers many other industries, including a few emerging ones such as the semiconductor industry and the Li-ion battery recycling industries. These industries have experienced significant growth over the past few years. Despite some successful examples of using cobots in semiconductor cleanrooms, such as KUKA's cobot in Infineon's cleanroom, IDTechEx has noted a few hurdles. For instance, it can be challenging to ensure that cobots meet stringent cleanliness requirements for semiconductor manufacturing environments. Current cobots may also struggle with ultra-precise tasks required in semiconductor production, necessitating further technological advancements. More challenges and future trends on cobots in the semiconductor industry can be found in the "Collaborative Robots 2025-2045: Technologies, Players, and Markets" report. Li-ion battery recycling industry, in contrast, has also seen potential of using cobots despite the low adoption rate at this stage. End-of-life battery recycling has been a significant market and is expected to grow substantially due to the increasing number of batteries being produced. However, cobots only has limited usage in this industry as of today because of the lack of standardization in battery disassembly process.

 

Further to the applications, the fundamentals of cobots lie in the technologies, such as sensors and software. Sensors are one of the most important enabling technologies for collaborative robots. The most typical sensors used in cobots for safety are torque sensors, where a range of sensor values are pre-set, and if a collision occurs, the values will exceed the range, which triggers the robot's emergency stop. However, IDTechEx has noticed a number of emerging sensors (e.g., tactile, proximity, etc.) to provide safety, but they have not been widely adopted in the markets so far.

 

End-effectors, also known as end-of-the-arm-tooling, are designed to enable robots to interact with their tasks. End-effectors can be classified as mechanical or electromechanical components depending on actuation principles. Typical end-effectors include grippers, process tools, and sensors. IDTechEx believes that the end-effector market will increase with the increasing adoption of cobots. However, since different cobots can share end-effectors, we think the end-effector market will saturate earlier than the cobot market.

 

 

 

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