When walking the floors of the massive show, attendees encountered UR robots everywhere; mounted on mobile robots, picking and placing, doing random bin picking, assembling in augmented reality, drilling, and soldering. The proliferation of the iconic blue cobots, that pioneered what is now the fastest-growing segment of industrial automation and continues to lead the cobot market, amazes UR’s CTO and founder, Esben Østergaard.
“For me personally I’m especially happy to see that the mission we had when we started the company actually seems to play out,” he says. “We wanted to make a tool that allowed people to automate on the factory floor on their own. It’s a tool for high-value creation especially in small and medium-sized companies now being used successfully deployed all over the world.”
Universal Robots is close to reaching a historic figure of 25,000 cobots sold. President Jurgen von Hollen attributed this milestone to the company’s UR+ strategy. A large part of Universal Robots’ own Hannover booth was dedicated to showing new products from this rapidly expanding portfolio of UR+ products certified to work seamlessly with UR robots.
“We have an open ecosystem of developers and partners helping us achieve the optimal solution for our customers worldwide,” he says. “They’re local, assisting customers in developing what they need specifically. For me, that’s an exciting part of our business. We’re not only looking at large customers or small, or medium but all customers worldwide in all applications and all industries. That’s the strength of Universal Robots.”