A Statistical Analysis of Commercial Articulated Industrial Robots and Cobots

Abstract

This paper undertakes a statistical analysis and review of commercial articulated industrial robots and collaborative robots (cobots) based on their documented specifications such as maximum payload, weight, reach, repeatability, average maximum angular speed and degrees of freedom (DOF). This elucidates the state-of-the-art of these robots, discerns the prevailing priorities and focus of the industry, and identifies both limitations and potential gaps. Industrial robots and cobots are compared and the respective advantages and limitations of industrial cobots are ascertained. Additionally, three novel factors are introduced in this survey as metrics to evaluate the efficiency and performance of industrial robots and cobots. Subsequently, the statistical distributions of these factors are investigated to obtain a systematic method for robot selection. An accompanying program has been developed and uploaded to GitHub which takes the required specifications and returns a list of proper and efficient robots sourced from different companies according to the aforementioned method. Although some robot makers provide some proprietary internal software to assist customers in finding their appropriate robots, the software just considers their own products and does not include those made by other manufacturers. In the end, specifications exhibiting strong correlations are compared in pairs to find out trends and relations between them within each company and across them all. This explains the reason behind these interrelationships, the design purpose of robot makers, and the limitations of industrial robots and cobots. Additionally, this helps industries predict the dependent specifications of articulated robots based on the specifications they require.