What is Cobotics and what changes it will bring to the business world?
Technology is evolving rapidly and the changes it brings to both industry and entrepreneurship as well as to our everyday life are crucial to the evolution and future of humanity.
These changes, of course, will not leave unchanged the labor sector and especially the part of the production and processing.
Maybe the idea of working and having robots as assistants sounds distant, but in industry, it is a reality. With Cobotics people are already working with robots.
But what do we mean by the term Cobotics?
The term derives from the words “cooperation” and “robotics“, and it refers to the cooperation between a person and a robot. The goal of this collaboration is to automate a wide range of tasks and perform the work with close cooperation between humans and machines.
A cobot or co-robot (from collaborative robot) is a robot intended to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace. This is in contrast with other robots, designed to operate autonomously or with limited guidance, which is what most industrial robots were up until the decade of the 2010s.
Tasks that are arduous, difficult or to which people add little value are transferred to machines. Cobots assist operators by augmenting their capabilities in terms of effort, allowing them to manipulate parts that are hot, heavy, bulky, or too small for precision handling. They give the ability to handle with a fairly high percentage of accuracy.
With this direct operator-machine contact, people has the ability to decide whether to interact with the machine or not. Operators remain indispensable for their skills and decision ability,undertaking more complex processes.
Cobotics are not by accident in revolutionary technologies (3D Printing, Internet of Things IoT, Nanotechnology, Cloud Computing, Augmented Reality) that will radically change industrial production.
Microsoft © presented two months ago a small video describing the benefits of cobotics:
This way of working contradicts the common belief that automation will abolish the human factor. Jobs can change and lead to the development of new skills, but people remain the focal point of this change.
P.G.A. & E.L.
