A collaborative robot (cobot) is an industrial robot designed and certified to work in direct physical proximity with human operators within a shared workspace, without requiring conventional hard safety guarding. Defined under ISO/TS 15066, cobots implement one or more of four collaborative operation modes — safety-rated monitored stop, hand guiding, speed-and-separation monitoring, and power-and-force limiting — each constraining robot behaviour so that human contact does not result in injury. Cobots typically feature lightweight, rounded structures, intrinsic force/torque sensing, and redundant safety-rated control architectures compliant with ISO 10218-1/-2.
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Primary Definition
Collaborative Robot (RB-0007) is distinguished from conventional industrial robots by its safety architecture rather than mechanical form. A cobot must demonstrate, through risk assessment under ISO 10218-1/-2 and application-specific assessment under ISO/TS 15066, that contact with a human under its intended operating modes does not produce forces or pressures exceeding the biomechanical limits tabulated in Annex A of ISO/TS 15066.
In practice, cobots achieve this through a combination of: (a) power-and-force limiting via torque-sensor or current-based contact detection, (b) speed limitation that caps TCP velocity when a human is within a monitored zone, and (c) mechanical design features (low inertia, rounded surfaces, no pinch points) that reduce injury potential. Impedance control (RB-0056) is frequently used as the underlying control strategy because it naturally yields to external contact forces.