The cobot is your best friend?

Discussions about the pros and cons of robots are almost as old as the road to Rome. Robots would "take away" our work and it would become an unsociable mess in companies. Practice, of course, has proven otherwise. With the cobot on the rise, the discussion seems to be reviving. Because a cobot by definition wants to cooperate, the feeling is even stronger that a cobot is literally taking the place of a human being. A colleague who will become redundant and have to leave. The opposite is currently true: due to a shortage of skilled personnel, companies are desperate for employees and how nice is it if one of the gaps can be filled by an advanced piece of technology?

Indeed. A piece of engineering. It is not a robot as children draw it, with two arms, two eyes and two wobbly legs. Granted, cobots can more often take the form of an arm-like structure, but that does not make it a solution with human traits. Cobots know no emotion, no pain, no Monday morning mood and no humor. As such, they can never become your friend and therefore cannot be your enemy.

Among other things, what distinguishes cobots from the familiar industrial robots is that the speeds of their movements are so low that no injury can occur upon impact with a human being. In addition, they are full of sensors that detect quickly enough when the cobot comes into contact with a person or an object. Call it a robot's eyes or sense of touch, I call it simply sensors that generate a signal and with this let the controller know that it is time to stop the movement. You can compare this to the empathic feelings of a cobot, but it's nothing more than a piece of intelligent software that controls it all.

Yet cobots can also elicit a sense of admiration from me. Not so much toward the cobot itself, but toward all the engineers and other bright minds who have been able to develop such solutions in recent years. From minute but high-precision sensors to practical grippers and associated controls. Developments have now even reached the point where a cobot can be flexibly set up by almost anyone. Without any knowledge of programming but simply via teach-in or other another simple way you can make cobots do exactly what you want. 

Moreover, I get a good feeling when I see cobots relieve people of boring, dangerous or complex tasks in sometimes uncomfortable conditions. For example, when cobots take over packaging tasks in cold, hygienic areas. But I also see companies that can respond more flexibly to changing customer demands by using a cobot. A beautiful piece of technology for a good feeling.

Jan Willem Addink - Commercial director of Olmia Robotics