Earlier this year, Automation World conducted an interview with Anders Billesø Beck, vice president of strategy and innovation at Universal Robots (UR), to get a preview of the company’s forthcoming UR20 collaborative robot (cobot). That cobot has now been demonstrated for the first time in North America at IMTS 2022 in Chicago.
As Beck noted in our discussion about the UR20, even though the exterior changes that can be seen on the UR20 at first appear to be minimal, the biggest changes took place in the cobot’s interior mechanical design.
He said that for the UR20 to carry its heavier payload and deliver a longer reach, UR’s designers had to do a “complete mechanical reengineering of the whole UR system concept. We hardened the design concept and shifted generations on a lot of technologies to deliver way more torque into the same package to reduce weight. This reduction in weight matters a lot to the collaborativeness of the robot because, in the end, it's all about having low momentum to move mass while keeping people safe.”
Key features of the UR20 include:
- A 20kg (44.1lbs.) payload capacity, which is 4kg more than UR’s previous heaviest load capability of 16kg with its UR16e cobot.
- Reach of 1750mm, which is 450mm more than longest previous UR cobot reach of 1300mm with the UR10e.
- Weight of the UR20, at 141.1 lbs., is nearly double the heaviest UR cobot, the UR10e, at 73.9 lbs.
- At 245mm, the footprint of the UR20 is 55mm larger than the footprint of UR’s URe10 or UR316, both of which have a footprint of 190mm.
