Although collaborative robots are an emerging market, there are already significant regional differences in their development trends.
The main motivations for end-users to buy collaborative robots are quite different in Europe and the US than in Asia Pacific, especially in China.
The two biggest considerations for users in Europe and the US are safety and ease of use:
Safety refers to the fact that, with the addition of many sensors, a collaborative robot can largely ensure the safety of the human workers sharing the same space, whether in a manufacturing plant or a logistics warehouse. In Europe and the United States, where unions are particularly strong, reducing safety risks is important, and customers are willing to pay more than traditional industrial robots for it.
Another point is ease of use. A large portion of the full lifecycle cost of a traditional industrial robot comes from the subsequent installation, commissioning, and maintenance costs, while the easy-to-use, low-maintenance nature of collaborative robots has greatly reduced the threshold for robot use, making many customers who have never used traditional industrial robots new users.
The two main drivers for the growth of collaborative robots in Asia Pacific are low initial purchase cost and easy reusability.
Compared to Europe and the US, the price of collaborative robot bodies in Asia Pacific, especially in mainland China, is more than 50% lower, and can even be lower than SCARA and small multi-joint robots of the same tonnage, which becomes a reason for many small and medium-sized manufacturers to choose collaborative robots in their initial robot purchase.
The second point, reusability, refers to the fact that with the renewal cycle of many industrial products, there has been a slow transition from the automotive industry's annual unit to the electronics industry's quarterly or even monthly iterations. With this, the upgrading of factory lines is becoming more and more frequent, so the traditional industrial robot fixed station use mode is no longer very suitable for this rapid pace of product iteration. Collaborative robots can quickly switch from station A to station B, making it very easy to make functional changes when production lines are being rebuilt or upgraded.
