Munich-based robotics startup KBee has launched an easily programmed lightweight industrial robot designed "specifically to serve and seamlessly interact with humans."

Franka Emika, as the robot is called, has a human-safe, force-limited robot arm with torque sensors in all seven of its axes that enable humanlike arm agility and sensitivity. Its workspace ranges from close to its base to a maximum reach equivalent to the length of a human arm. It also has a payload of 3kg. It is capable of identifying even a light touch and will shut down immediately if an employee comes too close to it.

The robot has a force-limited arm with sensors in seven axes enabling humanlike arm agility. Image credit: KBee. According to KBee, a key objective of the robot is to allow customers without any programming skills to be able to teach it to perform complex tasks within a couple of minutes. Out of the box, Franka Emika can accomplish tasks like pressing buttons, plugging in cables or placing objects. For more complex applications, rather than having to program algorithms directly into the robot, workflows can be compiled in a few minutes using a graphical user interface.

"Worldwide, robotics researchers are convinced that sensitive torque-controlled robots are the future—in particular, when considering the large-scale future topics such as robotic assistance, safe human-robot collaboration in production [and] service robotics," says Gerd Hirzinger, former director of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center.

As Franka Emika's programmed "skills" and "apps" reside in the cloud, KBee says it is possible to quickly share these archived tasks with multiple other robots locally or globally in the service of Industry 4.0-type applications.