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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will be the new trend which will follow each segment of Industrial Robotics. Since these (AI & ML) fields are new in the integration towards Industrial Robotics, new players have opportunities to enter the robotics market.
In today’s world, production processes are getting more complicated than ever before. In order to ensure all functions are performed timely, efficiently and with minimum or no errors, the need for industrial robots is being felt in many sectors. This need will grow with time as the demand to ramp up the production from various industrial sectors will surge.
Industrial robots help in producing good quality products with minimum wastage which is making them more lucrative for businesses. Since the 1960s, the industry has experienced tremendous growth and is expected to keep growing in the future.
Automation is the future of manufacturing and industrial robots are helping companies transition from a labour intensive factory to smart factories.
Global Industrial Robots Market is majorly driven by a surge in labour charges worldwide, which in turn has forced manufacturers to replace human labourers with machines. Asia and Europe are the key growth regions of the world, with leading players, namely ABB, Fanuc, KUKA, Kawasaki, and the Yaskawa Electric Corporation being based out in the region.
The demand for industrial robots is majorly observed in industries such as automobiles and heavy engineering. However, increased need for automation in non-conventional areas, such as microelectronics, has increased the demand of industrial robotics.
Hence, an auxiliary channel utilizing industrial robotics has surfaced in recent years. The heavy engineering sector is also responsible for the increased demand of industrial robotics.
The global industrial robots market is impacted by several factors such as usage of industrial robotics in the manufacturing industry, increased demand for automation activities in the industry, reduction in custom duties, and evolving robotics & artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Furthermore, the high cost of industrial robotics solutions is a major hindrance for the industrial robotics market growth.
The following factors are driving the demand for industrial robots
Them main robots used by different industries are mainly
The articulated, cartesian, delta and SCARA robots currently dominate the market due to their extensive use in the automobile and electronics industry and presence in the market for many years. They are also known as traditional or stand alone robots collectively.
On the other hand, collaborative robots which are new in the market are expected to show growth in the coming years. The collaborative robots do not require safety features to operate which reduces its installation costs. They are also simpler to use and run making them lucrative. However, the main reasons why they are not being adopted at a large scale are lower speed, accuracy and payload capacity.
The different areas of applications of industrial robots market are
Industrial robots are used the most for machine handling operations, followed by welding and soldering and assembling. It is expected that in the period 2021-2025, the use of industrial robots in the processing sphere will show the highest rate of growth as there will be a shortage of labour owing to the dangerous nature of the work.
Various industries are adopting the use of industrial robots. Some of the prominent industries had have shown high demand in the past are :
The automotive industry has the highest demand, followed by the electronics industry. In the automobile manufacturing process, the industrial robots assist in high payload lifting. However, it is forecasted that the electronics industry will offer greater demand due to the profitability of adopting this technology. Automation can be used to produce many electronic items and help reduce costs as chances of errors and wastage will be reduced. Operational flexibility is another factor that the use of these robots offer.
The region wise segmentation of the industrial robots market is as follows:
The Asia Pacific region has the largest market share. The top 5 countries which constitute 70% of the world’s demand are China, South Korea, Japan, Germany and the USA.
The covid-19 impact on industrial robotics market size mainly involved in the prices of peripherals, software, and system engineering, where they are expected to increase immensely.
Dearth of skilled labour and solicitation of proposals by governments and public-private companies to mitigate the adverse impact of COVID-19 are key driving factors for the market. Although the COVID-19 pandemic had negatively affected the market growth till Q2 or Q3 of 2020, the market rebounded from 2021 onwards as the players in the industrial robotics market cleared their backlogs and started with the new orders.
The end-use industries and their operations being stopped is expected to have a negative impact on the growth of the industrial robotics market in the near future is mainly attributed to the stringent lockdown regulations amidst the coronavirus pandemic.
The negative growth of the market Articulated robots is in use in a larger set of industries compared to other types of industrial robots. The automotive industry accounts for the major share of articulated robots as their production processes are heavily automated.
Although most industries are affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic, articulated robots are still expected to maintain the highest share of the industrial robotics market during the forecast period.
Other robots, such as SCARA and parallel robots, are more specialized and not as versatile in terms of payload and reach compared to articulated robots. Hence, articulated robots will still maintain the largest share in the industrial robotics industry throughout the forecast period.
September 2021: Novarc Technologies unveiled its Spool Welding Robot+HyperFill solution at FabTech in Chicago. The SWR+HyperFill is a dual torch system designed to increase heavy fabrication productivity by increasing weld deposition rates. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based company claims it can increase productivity by 350-500 factored diameter inches (FDI).
July 2021: The FLAIROP (Federated Learning for Robot Picking) project Festo and researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), together with partners from Canada, want to make picking robots smarter using distributed AI methods. To do this, they are investigating how to use training data from multiple stations, from multiple plants, or even companies without requiring participants to hand over sensitive company data.
July 2021: Ambi Robotics introduced AmbiKit, a new multi-robot kitting solution that is designed to package “kits” . The automated solution uses artificial intelligence to learn how to identify and pick up items out of bulk storage and singulate them for the kitting operation. The company claims that their robots are trained 10,000x faster than alternatives.
June, 2021: ABB’s award winning Compact Painting Solution enabled automotive manufacturers to reduce the cost of interior painting and saving space of stations by about one third.
April, 2021: KUKA presented its first look of operating system iiQKA.OS, which aims to simplify robot use.
April, 2021: FANUC’s new ROBOCUT a-CiC series provides even higher levels of reliability, cutting speed, surface finish and dimensional precision.
March, 2021: FANUC added digital services to its services offering agreement which will reduce repair times and will help in fast diagnosis with secure data connection.
March, 2021: ABB’s SafeMove collaborative robot enhanced employee safety while increasing efficiency at Nestle’s Brazilian plant
Feb, 2021: ABB launched GoFa CRB 15000 cobot featuring intelligent sensors and with a payload capacity of 5 kg.
Feb, 2021: FANUC launched its new fourth variation of SCARA robot, SR-20iA, can provide payload capacity of 20 kg with a wrist inertia of 0.45 kgm2.
Though there is higher adoption and increase in investment in the industry, there are a few roadblocks which may hinder the growth of industrial robots. Some of these are :
In order to solve these problems, the manufacturers need to work on building an easy and unified system of programming and improved integration capabilities of robots.
Technological advancement in this industry by manufacturers will provide more opportunity for growth. Currently, the use of artificial intelligence and sensors is being observed in this sphere.
Various growth strategies such as mergers and acquisitions are being adopted by the current manufacturers to retain their market share.
FANUC has mainly invested in the China market and disputes with the U.S. and the pandemic situation has worsened the condition for the company. But the company is restructuring its investment proposal for the FY 2021.
FANUC & Yaskawa Electric has installed more than 400k & 360k, respectively, industrial robots worldwide by 2020.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries delivered a bulk carrier, HAMPTON SKY, to BATANAGAR SHIPPING CORPORATION, China.
DENSO uses its own robot in its production factory in order to have low cost of ownership and is successfully making an impact of it’s robots in the industry.
With demand surge towards electrification and automation, Mitsubishi electric business model looks promising in the near future.
Carbon Robotics closed its $27 million in Series B financing from Anthos Capital, Ignition Capital, Fuse Venture Partners and Voyager Capital to accelerate the company’s growth.
The funding will be used to scale production of the company’s products, including the Autonomous Weeder, grow its engineering team, establish regional support for customers across the U.S. and invest in the innovation of new products and technology. This latest round of financing brings the company’s overall funding to $35.9 million.
Gatik, a 2020 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award winner, raised $85 million in Series B funding. The oversubscribed round brings Gatik’s total funding to $114.5 million since it was founded in 2017.
OSARO raised $30 million in Series C funding, led by Octave Ventures. New participants in this round include Octave Ventures, J17 Capital, and Tomales Bay Capital. Existing investors AME Cloud Ventures, iRobot Corporation, King River Capital, and Founders Fund also contributed. This latest round brings OSARO’s total funding to date to $67.5 million.
Berkshire Grey began trading on the NASDAQ after completing the integration with SPAC Revolution Acceleration Acquisition Corp.
Fetch Robotics generated annualized run-rate sales of approximately $10 million.
ASTI Mobile Robotics, a Spanish company, was acquired by industrial robot leader ABB for an undisclosed amount.
Novanta, a precision photonics and motion control company, made two acquisitions. It first acquired motion control provider Schneider Electric Motion USA for $115 million in cash. One week later, it acquired end of arm tooling leader ATI Industrial Automation for $172 million cash.
Some of the prominent players in industrial robots market are
