What Is a Cobot?
Collaborative robots, or cobots, are designed to work directly alongside humans, handling tasks that require precision, repetition or dexterity. Unlike industrial robots, which operate at high speeds and require protective cages to prevent humans from getting too close, cobots incorporate force limits, collision detection and gentler movement, allowing them to safely share space with human workers.
Because of their human-centered design, cobots excel at tasks such as pick and place, machine tending, light assembly and packaging. However, they do not autonomously move around a facility. Their role is to improve human productivity at a specific station while automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) perform transport chores.
Industrial robots spare humans from dangerous tasks, such as pouring hot metal, but because they are made from heavy, rigid materials and can move with bone-crushing force, they are often isolated from humans, either behind walls or in protective enclosures. Although that separation is effective at reducing risk, it limits how well such robots can be integrated into manufacturing workflows, and accidents can still occur during maintenance or setup.
To address these limitations, in the late 1990s two Northwestern University professors reconceived robot design. Their innovation was human-safe robots bounded by height, weight and force constraints, along with better perception of human presence. These cobots usually take the form of large mechanical arms with six degrees of freedom.
To ensure safety, cobots need to have several capabilities. They require sensing and perception technologies that allow them to “see” their immediate environment and determine whether there are humans present. The sensing and perception systems can also enable cobots to help with inspections, quality assurance and process intelligence. Cobots must also have a robust real-time operating system that allows them to make decisions and react quickly. And they require hardware — all the way down to the connector level — that is reliable in a wide range of conditions.
This combination is key to making cobots productive in modern industrial operations. With all of these elements in place, cobots have found widespread use in manufacturing facilities, medical institutions and similar settings.
A Cobot by Any Other Name
As robots have evolved from science fiction characters to practical devices, the distinction between robots and cobots has blurred. Originally, robots and cobots were considered so different that they were governed by two separate sets of standards. Industrial robots had to comply with ISO 10218, which covered design and system integration. But cobots additionally had to comply with ISO/TS 15066, a separate supplement that sets guidelines for human-robot collaboration, including quantifying how much force and pressure a robot can safely exert on a human body part.
Acknowledging that many new robot types, such as carebots in medical settings, now interact with humans, the International Organization for Standardization deprecated the term “cobot.” Currently, it defines categories based on what a robotic device does. ISO 10218-2025 now incorporates the guidelines from ISO/TS 15066 and focuses on risk assessments of force and pressure levels for distinct types of robotic applications.
For many companies, cobots remain a well-defined and popular product category, with manufacturers of industrial robots designating robots with stationary mechanical arms “cobots” while referring to their mobile counterparts as AMRs.