Co-bot stands for “collaborative robots”. These robots are designed to work alongside humans, by performing repetitive or heavy tasks, which would greatly ease the burden on the human worker while he or she can focus on tasks that require higher skills.
A critical item for making this possible is to implement certain safety mechanisms on these robots, in order to prevent harm to humans. This can be achieved by certain sensors placed on the robots body, in order to prevent impacts to human workers. These sensors include force, torque and ultrasonic sensors. It is also necessary to cover robots body with soft material.
Working alongside humans means that there will be more unexpected circumstances in robots environment, in comparison to unchanging environments of industrial robots. Therefore, these robots must operate with considerably more complex visual recognition and AI abilities. These robots can also be trained for new tasks by literally guiding them physically in addition to classical programming, which is very intuitive and efficient.
The market of collaborative robots is ever growing, since their beginning about 1-2 decades ago.
