A Methodology for Comparative Analysis of Collaborative Robots for Industry 4.0

Collaborative robots are one of the key drivers in Industry 4.0 and they have evolved considerably since the last decades of the 20th century. With respect to the industrial robots, collaborative robots are more productive, flexible, versatile and safer. In the recent years, many industrial robot producers and startups entered the segment of collaborative robots. In this paper, we propose a methodology for developing a comparative analysis of the collaborative robots currently available in the market. The goal of the paper is to provide a framework for allowing the benchmarking, based on common robot parameters and standardized experiments that can be performed with the robot under investigation. An experimental technological review of three different collaborative robots is provided, to show how the methodology can be applied in real cases.