Collaborative Robots(Cobots) Market - Forecast(2024 - 2030)

The cobots market in 2020 was around $785 million and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 25.6% during the forecast period to reach $2.31 billion by 2026. The entire robotics industry is witnessing the effects of Covid-19 pandemic, with strain felt on the supply chain restricting parts imports and equipment exports in H1 especially. The overall economic uncertainty also pushed majority of customers to defer purchases in order to conserve capital. In 2020, the majority market share was held by Automotive sector with 23% share, followed by Healthcare industry with 16% revenue share. Collaborative robots (cobots) represent a variant of industrial robots and is currently considered to be one of the fastest growing segments in industrial automation. A cobot is a type of robot that is designed to operate alongside humans in shared workspaces. These machines are easy to program and deploy, can increase productivity manifold, and offer high returns on investment.

The report: “Cobot Market Report– Forecast (2021-2026)”, by IndustryARC covers an in-depth analysis of the following segments of the Cobot market

By Type: Power and Force Limiting, Safety monitored stop, Speed and Separation, Hand Guiding

By End User:   Automotive, Electronics, Semiconductor, Plastics and   Polymer, Food and Beverage, Healthcare, Metals and   Machining and others

By Application: Handling, Assembling/Disassembling, Welding and Soldering, Dispensing, Packaging and Others

By Geography: North America (U.S, Canada, Mexico), South America(Brazil, Argentina and others), Europe(Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Others), APAC(China, Japan India, SK, Aus and Others), and RoW (Middle East and Africa)

Power and Force Limiting robots will reach $1bn market size by 2026. Almost all the companies have a competing robot for the same payload category with similar performances, thus giving power to customers to choose from any integrator suiting their budget and application requirements. These prices of cobots can vary depending upon manufacturer and payload categories. The selection of cobots is mainly dependent upon the end use cases that differ for various applications. Power and Force Limiting cobots are what most people will likely visualize of when they hear the term collaborative robots. These cobots are specifically designed to allow for direct interaction with human workers without the need for additional safety barriers, vision systems, or external scanners. Further enhancing human safety, power and force limiting cobots are designed without sharp corners, exposed motors, or pinch points. For power and force limiting cobots to safely work alongside human workers, the cobots have sensitive collision monitors built-in. 

Automotive industry is one of the foremost industries to adopt cobots to conduct various operations in the production plants and will reach $477m by 2026. The key applications of these robots are: Robotic Vision, production optimization, assembly tasks, advanced assembling, car painting and so on. To achieve more productivity and to conduct high load operations with extra speed, the cobots have always been beneficial and cost effective for the automotive manufacturers. The ever-growing automotive market in countries such as the U.S., China, India and Germany brings in constant demand for industrial robots and cobots. In 2019, China produced 25 million vehicles and is one of the largest markets for automobiles. This is estimated to grow at 5% through 2025 requiring significant process optimization and create ample demand for industrial robots. With automotive production regulations becoming stringent day by day and changing consumer trends, the cobots market is forecast to showcase good growth in the next five years. Group PSA’s Sochaux plant in France has chosen Universal Robots UR10 for its "Plant of the Future" Project. Two UR10 cobots have been implemented at the Sochaux plant in screw driving applications on body-in-white assembly lines to increase performance and reduce production costs at the factory. In 2019, Walmart has planned to invest $2.7 billion to add new robots totalling almost 4,000 robots in its stores and facilities in order to shift human workforce to customer service roles. The robots are majorly used for scanning, sorting goods from delivery trucks. This is set to create opportunities for cobots in retail sector.

Geographically, APAC held major share of 41% of cobots market share in 2020, owing to high adoption of automation technologies in industrial and automotive warehouses and increasing investments and funding. North America is the next largest market with 29% revenue share in 2020.  South America is witnessing the fastest growth rate with a CAGR of around 32.3% during the forecast period 2021 – 2026 owing to high investments and growing deployment of automation technology mainly in the countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. It is estimated that the cobot sale and installations are expected to reach 76,000 units per year in 2025 from around 22,000 in 2019. Portuguese company MOV.AI has announced in October, 2020 that it has raised $4m in funding. The company has designed its ROS for manufacturers of cobots, as well as academics and automation integrators. It also contributes to the ROS community.

There has been significant growth in collaborative robotics market owing to the increased demand for automation, high competition in the e-commerce industry, and the advancement in technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The use of robots reduces the risk of injury to workforce has also witnessed growth. Integration of robots with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision technology has been assisting companies in obstacle detection, navigation, movement of the goods. This has been attracting vendors in automating the warehouses and installing the robots in warehouse, thereby driving the collaborative robotics market.  In 2019, Geek Plus Robotics, an intelligent logistics robot solution provider had launched the world’s first interweaving sorting robot, which could be an alternative to conveyor systems. Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR), a leading manufacturer of collaborative mobile robots launched a new warehouse robot to automate the transportation of pallets and heavy goods across warehouses. Development of new robots for various applications of warehouses set to boost the demand of collaborative robotics market.

The labour cost is highly significant in the total industrial operating cost, making generally 62%-65% of the total cost. In majority of the cases, manual jobs typically consist of two categories of staff: direct and indirect where industries cover an area of more than 200,000 square feet. Direct staff is responsible for executing the process while indirect staff is for the back-end support for direct staff. As average hourly earnings will hike further amidst the rising global inflation with weekly hours to remain constant or decline in the coming years, the operating costs are bound to advance. Apart from this, the developing nations have seen a constant growth in the ageing workforce resulting in issues related to safety, quality control and productivity. Thus, the automation of industries has become a notable means to tackle the rising wages and workforce age. This has resulted in the industrial operators to rely upon the robotics to provide a convenient and efficient way of reducing the operational costs while simultaneously maintaining the productivity at optimum levels. Companies are turning to technology to compete in response to shrinking labor pools as Baby Boomers retire, and labor costs increase. Cobots manufactured by companies such as Rethink Robotics, Kuka, and Universal Robots hope to provide solutions to these labor and cost concerns.

The initial cost of collaborative robots that are used in factories are high as the cost of automation is much higher in comparison with labor costs. This prevents most companies from completely automating their operations with robots. The average selling prices of cobots vary from $25,000 to $50,000 and does not include the installation costs. In addition to this, there is a training cost associated with the robots that further restricts the operators’ likeability for integrating robots into their operating lines. Slow deployment of collaborative robotic systems by smaller and medium enterprises hampers the robotics market. However, high labor costs are set to drive the collaborative robot market during forecast period.

Product launches, acquisitions, Partnerships and R&D activities are key strategies adopted by players in the Cobot market. Cobot top 10 companies include Univeral Robots, Fanuc, Kuka, Rethink Robotics, Techman, AUBO, ABB, Kawasaki, Yaskawa and Sataubli among others.