INFOGRAPHIC: A Brief History of Collaborative Robots ENGINEERING.com

Let's travel back in time to 2008 – Linatex, a Danish supplier of technical plastics and rubbers for industrial applications, buys the new UR5 robot to automate a CNC machine tending application. Unlike a conventional robot arm, this 18.4 kg (40.6 lbs) arm didn't need to be surrounded by a fence to protect facility workers. Linatex didn't need to hire external programmers to set it up, and instead used workers to perform the setup in-house, on a touch pad, without any prior programming experience. This event is what Universal Robots (UR) credits as the beginning of the age of collaborative robots, or "cobots" for short. Cobots, like any new technology, were initially met with skepticism.