ROBOTICS CLUSTER

Key Market: Collaborative Robotics
Industrial robots have been engineered to serve multiple purposes and, as a group, they have found great
success. Yet for all their accomplishments, the usefulness of these same systems has been limited by their
high costs, complex programming, inflexibility, and inability to work in close association with humans.
Rethink Robotics is located in the
Boston area, as is Teradyne, the
parent company to Universal Robots.
The collaborative robotics sector is
expected to increase roughly tenfold
between 2015 and 2020.
As a result, the market for collaborative robots—human-scale systems that are easy to set up and program,
are capable of being used by workers with a wide range of qualification levels, can support multiple types of
automation, and can work safely in close proximity to human workers, often collaboratively—is very active
at this time. Both large, established robotics suppliers, as well as new, smaller firms, have released or are
developing innovative collaborative robotics technologies into the market. Larger firms are actively acquiring
smaller companies with proven technology. Examples of collaborative robots include ABB’s YuMi and
Roberta platforms, Rethink Robotics’ Baxter and Sawyer, Universal Robots’s (Teradyne) UR family of robots,
KUKA’s LBR iiwa, and Kawada Industries’s Nextage.
The collaborative robotics sector is expected to increase roughly tenfold between 2015 and 2020, reaching
more than US$1 billion from approximately US$95 million in 2015 (Figure 4). This growth will be fueled by
three key markets: electronics manufacturers and electronics manufacturing services companies, small-tomedium
manufacturers, and manufacturers seeking robotics solutions optimized to support agile production
methodologies.
While demand side/supply side dynamics has played a significant role in the expansion of the collaborative
robotics sector, much of early development of the technologies incorporated into the systems was the result
of early, and formal, academic-business-government partnerships. These efforts went beyond funding
for pure and applied research. Eventually, the resultant technologies were transferred to the private sector.
The development of ABB’s YuMi and Kawada Industries’s Nextage provide examples.
Figure 4: Collaborative Robots, Total Worldwide Revenue by Year
(Source: ABI Research)
$1,200
Revenue ($ Millions)
$1,000
$800
$600
$400
$1,001
$200
$95
$0
2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
Year
Table 3: Representative Massachusetts Industrial Robotics Companies
Rethink Robotics, Universal Robots, RightHand Robotics, Soft Robotics, Empire Robotics, Vaccon
(Source: ABI Research)
www.abiresearch.com
THE MASSACHUSETTS ROBOTICS CLUSTER
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