Japanese companies see big things in small-scale industrial robots

TOKYO: A two-armed robot in a Japanese factory carefully stacks rice balls in a box, which a worker carries off for shipment to convenience stores.

At another food-packaging plant, a robot shakes pepper and powdered cheese over pasta that a person has just arranged in a container.

In a country known for bringing large-scale industrial robots to the factory floor, such relatively dainty machines have until recently been dismissed as niche and low-margin.

But as workforces age in Japan and elsewhere, collaborative robots - or "cobots" - are seen as a key way to help keep all types of assembly lines moving without replacing humans.

Japan's Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric, two of the world's largest robot manufacturers, didn't see the shift coming.

Now they are trying to catch up.

"We didn't expect large manufacturers would want to use such robots, because those robots can lift only a light weight and have limited capabilities," said Kazuo Hariki, an executive director at Fanuc.

Although still a small portion of a $40 billion industrial robot market, the cobots segment is set to grow over the next decade to more than $10 billion, by some estimates - several dozen times its current size.

The concept of a robot co-worker is relatively new.

Danish company Universal Robots, founded in 2005, introduced cobots for industrial applications in late 2008, closely working with major German automakers such as Volkswagen.

At first, "a lot of people misunderstood what the cobot is," said Universal Robots´ chief executive, Juergen von Hollen.

But the machines quickly became popular in Europe because of their safety, simplicity and ability to directly assist human workers, he said.

Sup ported by Berlin´s "Industrie 4.0" strategy to promote smart factories, the likes of Kuka and Robert Bosch followed Universal Robots into the market in the early 2010s.

Relatively inexpensive and easy to operate, cobots are now used by companies of all sizes for small-batch manufacturing and simple processes.