Despite the current market size, agriculture is expected to be the fastest growing application segment for collaborative robot sales over the next five years, with a compound annual growth rate of 39.1%. Automation using machine vision could help make up for labor shortages in the field.

The new energy sector (including battery manufacturing, photovoltaic, wind and hydrogen) is expected to have the second highest CAGR (30.1%).

5X00846G01 Logistics is not far behind, with a forecast CAGR of 28.8%. In addition, the robot palletizing with the vision system is also a key application scenario, and the introduction of collaborative robots will help further reduce the threshold for robot use and promote the demand for robots in this field.

Applications: The rapid rise of welding and stacking

According to Interact Analysis’s Industrial Robots research report, welding and material handling are the two largest downstream applications for industrial robots. In 2023, more than half of global industrial robot sales will come from these two main applications, with the majority coming from heavy-duty multi-jointed robots. In contrast, cobots deployed in welding scenarios accounted for only 4.9% of total cobot revenue in 2022, and this proportion increases to 5.6% in 2023.

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The huge growth potential of collaborative robots in welding applications is beginning to emerge. The quality consistency of manual welding is poor and the working environment is harsh, which makes welding the main factor affecting the overall quality results of the production line, and it is also the most difficult to recruit workers. In small factories, flexible and easily deployable cobots can be used to weld small workpieces, while on large assembly lines, complex 5X00846G01 workpieces can also be welded by combining multiple cobots or using a combination of cobots and skilled workers.

Collaborative palletizing has also become a hot topic, with a significant increase in simple palletizing applications for collaborative robots, as well as an increase in applications with loads greater than 10kg in the food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries last year.