Collaborative Robot (Cobot) that can collaborate with humans by fusion with many advanced technologies among industrial robots in the industrial field are attracting attention. In this study, the engineers of Small and Medium Enterprises can directly participate in the cobot design, and ultimately, the possibility of deriving the shape design of the differentiated cobot was studied. The method applied to derive the shape design of differentiated cobot is ‘Morphological Analysis’. First, the design elements of the form of cobots were derived as ‘Link’ and ‘Joint’. In addition, by analyzing the image form of the Link and Joint of the existing cobot, a new form element of the Link and Joint was proposed. In order to quantitatively identify the most discriminating cobot shape design, FGI (Focus Group Interview) was conducted to derive image types of 4 Link and 3 Joint. Then, the most important ‘Shape Combination’ was carried out in morphological analysis, and 12 new cobot shape designs were drawn. Through this, the applicability of the morphological analysis method in the derivation of differentiated cobot shape design was examined.

Direct teaching is an essential function for collaborative robots for easy use by non-experts. For most robots, direct teaching is implemented only in joint space because the realization of Cartesian space direct teaching, in which the orientation of the end-effector is fixed while teaching, requires a measurement of the end-effector force. Thus, it is limited to the robots that are equipped with an expensive force/torque sensor. This study presents a Cartesian space direct teaching method for torque-controlled collaborative robots without either a force/torque sensor or joint torque sensors. The force exerted to the end-effector is obtained from the external torque which is estimated by the disturbance observer-based approach with the friction model. The friction model and the estimated end-effector force were experimentally verified using the robot equipped with joint torque sensors in order to compare the proposed sensorless approach with the method using torque sensors.