Cobots:Robots for collaboration with peopleA cobot is a robot for direct physical interaction with a human user, within a shared workspace. Cobots were invented by Northwestern University professors J. Edward Colgate and Michael Peshkin in 1996. Cobots were intitially called "programmable constraint machines", highlighting a passive and safe method for allowing a computer to create a constraint surface for a human user (and optionally a payload) to follow. The term "cobot" was coined by Brent Gillespie, a postdoc at Northwestern University at that time, in response to a lab competition to come up with a better name. Cobot was chosen as one of the Words of Tomorrow by the Wall Street Journal in its January 1 2000 issue. Brent won $50. The first patent related to cobots (US 5,923,129) was filed in February 1996, and a patent using the new name (US 5,952,796) was filed in October 1997. The first academic paper on cobots was
It won the Best Conference Paper award. The first paper using the word cobot was
Development of cobots at Northwestern University was supported by the General Motors Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Ford Motor Company. A spinoff company, Cobotics LLC, was founded in 1996 by Colgate and Peshkin, to develop, manufacture, and license cobotic technology. In 2002 Cobotics LLC was acquired by Stanley Assembly Technologies, Inc. Other terms that are used for human-interactive robots include collaborative robots, co-robots, and Intelligent Assist Devices (IADs). IAD is used especially in the material handling field. A 2002 white paper on Cobots and IADs describes Cobotics' view of the future of human-robot collaboration. The Robotics Industries Association issued a safety standard for IADs. Non-technical reports & publicity
Somewhat technical
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