The global shortage of skilled workers is a growing problem for manufacturers. A recent report by the World Economic Forum and Deloitte entitled The Future of Manufacturing: Opportunities to Drive Economic Growth estimates that around 10 million manufacturing jobs worldwide cannot be filled due to a widening skills gap.
While myriad factors are at play, a potential solution lies in the increased deployment of robotics and, more specifically, the introduction of “cobots” to the factory floor. Cobots, or collaborative robots, are robots that are designed to work safely alongside humans, freeing up humans to do less tedious and more value-added work, with positive implications for productivity and quality, and higher engagement levels on the part of humans.
Cobots are often more affordable than traditional robots, making them accessible to a wide range of enterprises and they are designed to be easy to programme, even for those from non-technical backgrounds. Their applications can range from assembly tasks such as screwing, welding and part insertion to material handling – for example, picking and moving items. They can also be deployed in quality inspection, among other roles.
The concept and use of cobots has come a long way since they were introduced en masse in the early 2000s, says Court Edmondson, director of automation and robotics at Irish Manufacturing Research. They were initially developed in response to a need in the manufacturing industry to deliver a robotic arm that was inherently safer to operate in a human environment.
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“The hardware addresses several key industry needs, such as the need to retrofit robotic automation to constrained brownfield or existing manufacturing sites, where there was insufficient space for fully segregated industrial robots, as well as the need to develop lower-cost robots that can be trained by demonstration as well as by coding. The idea is to have robots that can assist human operators in a shared workspace to increase overall productivity,” he says.
A key benefit has been the ability to programme a cobot’s path quickly and easily, he explains, which was enabled through what is known as a “teaching mode”. This approach allows workers who do not know how to programme and control a robot through software coding skills to achieve it through pushing and pulling the robot to a desired position and saving the pattern or “path”.
While cobots are employed across a wide range of industries of various scales, they often come into their own on the production floors of small to medium sized manufacturers in high mix, low volume (HMLV) settings. This is because they can be easily reprogrammed during a shift. Consider, for example, a small food company running a line of tinned soups of various varieties and consistencies that needs to be adjusted during the day.
Safety considerations about the use of cobots are largely overblown and have not been a big issue in practice since their widespread introduction from the early noughties onwards. Safety, Edmondson points out, typically addresses the wider issue of the overall application rather than just the hardware.
“This is reflected in the newest standard, ISO 10218-2:2025. This standard brings an important shift in its language that addresses any collaborative paradigm needed by manufacturers, in terms of an ‘application’ and not simply the ‘robot’.
Indeed, far from threatening their human collaborators, working alongside cobots has numerous advantages, as Edmondson points out: “One of the principles that guides people in the robotics industry is addressing the so-called three Ds – the dull, the dirty and the dangerous. When manufacturers pick something that they’re looking to automate, it’s often a high repetition task that’s going to be dull for a human to do and you’ll often see quality defects, because people just get bored of doing the same thing over and over again.
“When you replace dull tasks through automation, you’re going to improve all sorts of metrics, from repetitive stress injuries to that person just having an increased amount of satisfaction from going to work every day because now they’re operating with the robotic cells instead of just moving widgets from point A to point B.”
