Cobot: the collaborative robot, and the 2025 rules

What makes a robot collaborative

An ordinary industrial robot is fast, strong and blind, so it is put behind a fence with an interlocked gate. A collaborative robot is built to work beside a person instead: it is slower, lighter, usually rounded rather than angular, and it senses contact and stops. The gain is floor space and flexibility. The cost is cycle time and payload, which is why cobots have not replaced fenced robots in spot welding or heavy press tending.

The four collaborative techniques

The safety standards recognise four ways of making shared work safe, and a real installation often uses more than one.

• Safety-rated monitored stop. The robot halts while a person is in the shared space and resumes when they leave, without powering down.
• Hand guiding. The operator moves the robot by hand through a device with an enabling switch, typically to teach positions.
• Speed and separation monitoring. Sensors track the distance between person and robot, and the robot slows as the gap closes and stops before contact is possible.
• Power and force limiting. The robot is designed so that any contact stays below the force and pressure limits the standard sets for the part of the body it could touch.

What changed in 2025

ISO/TS 15066, published in 2016, was the technical specification everyone cited for collaborative work. Its requirements were folded into ISO 10218-2:2025 when both parts of ISO 10218 were revised, so a single normative document now covers robot cells and collaborative work together.

The revision also moved the vocabulary. The standards describe a collaborative application, not a collaborative robot, and the reason is practical: a power-and-force-limited arm holding a sharp deburring tool, or carrying a hot casting, is not safe merely because the arm is. Safety is a property of the whole installation, so the risk assessment has to cover the gripper, the workpiece, the speed and the layout as well as the robot. Buying a machine described as collaborative does not discharge that duty.

What India installs

India installed 9,120 industrial robots in 2024, an increase of 7% and a national record, which makes it the sixth largest installer in the world, behind Germany, Korea, the United States, Japan and China. Its operational stock reached 52,570 robots, tenth worldwide.

The automotive industry took 45% of those installations, 4,070 units, of which component suppliers accounted for 2,100, up 40%, while vehicle makers installed 1,980, down 3%. Outside automotive the numbers are still small: 600 installations in plastics and chemical products, up 33%, and 420 in the metal industry, up 30%. Those two lines are the ones a job shop should read, and they say that robot adoption in Indian metalworking is early rather than absent.

Cobots are a subset of all of this. The International Federation of Robotics put them at 10.5% of the 541,302 industrial robots installed worldwide in 2023, and does not break the figure out for India.

Where a cobot earns its place on an Indian shop floor

The cases that pay are the dull ones: loading and unloading a vertical machining centre or a turning centre so an operator can run two machines instead of one, palletising, machine-side inspection, screwdriving and dispensing. Machine tending is the easiest of those to justify, because CNC machines already signal the end of a cycle on an output the cell can read, so the cobot needs no extra sensing to know when to open the door. A cobot on a mobile base can be wheeled between machines as the order book changes, which suits a shop whose batch sizes vary more than its processes do.

Two things are routinely underestimated. The gripper and the part presentation usually cost more engineering than the arm, and the risk assessment is a document somebody has to produce and keep. A cobot cell is one of the cheapest entry points into the shop-floor data a factory can act on, because the controller already knows every cycle it ran.

What Indian integrators and machine builders are installing, and what it costs, is covered in the site’s automation systems news. Electrical and automation is one of the sectors the EngiExpo organiser names on its own schedule page, so the EngiExpo 2026 dates and venues are the shortest route to standing in front of one of these arms instead of reading about it.