MT Magazine January/February 2023

MT MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

27

The Art of Collaboration Coordinating the activities between automation and workers is something that requires deliberate design. BY ANDRA KEAY VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL ROBOTICS Collaborative robots – or cobots – go back to the mid-1990s, but their commercial availability became more pronounced in the mid-2000s. During the second half of that decade, the availability of these devices, which are ostensibly meant to work closely with human workers, became widespread, and the growth of the number of devices as well as their capacities and architectures increased commensurately. There are plenty of applications where cobots and humans work in proximity and harmony. In an industrial setting, cobots generally work either separately from human workers within a given space or sequentially with the worker in the space. There are strict safety protocols for cobots