Techman and OMRON Partner to Produce Co-branded Cobot

In May of 2018, Techman Robot Inc. of Taiwan and OMRON Corp. of Japan announced a strategic alliance was being formed between the two companies to further the distribution and exposure of Techman’s TM series collaborative robots to global markets.  By the end of the year, co-branded Techman OMRON cobots started hitting factory floors.  This partnership opens some interesting doors into the future of cobotics.

Founded in 2012, Techman has been producing an innovative line of cobots.  With an easy-to-program interface, integrated vision, and various models with varying payloads, Techman is certainly making a splash in the cobot market in Asia and the UK.  Distributor HMK reported that Techman was slated to ship its 4,000th TM-series cobot by the end of 2018 – certainly no small feat.  With the addition of OMRON’s enormous distribution network, global markets are now within Techman’s reach.  Perhaps the most interesting vision for this new partnership is the potential for cobots to be mounted to OMRON’s mobile factory robots .  This combination of technology allows the cobot to travel around the factory floor to perform various tasks at various locations without needing a human to move it.

As this new partnership develops, it will be interesting to see how existing cobots manufactured by Universal Robots and others will be affected.  If the OMRON TM cobots take off in Europe and North America, expect the response from other cobot manufacturers to be both strong and innovative.