These lighter, more flexible and easily configured robots are boosting automation – and the market for them. They're a boon to companies that want less expensive tech integrated smartly alongside their human workers, improving both line safety and productivity.

In 2016, the global "collaborative robot" market stood at USD$175.5 million, and that's set to blow up to $3.8 billion by 2021. That's because of both improvements in technology that make the cobots feasible in a wider range of applications, and the ability to make industrial robots smaller and human-friendly.

The cobots are different, because they're meant to be right at the human elbow. They're smaller, made with lightweight aluminium or magnesium arms especially useful when they can be retooled quickly. They're sometimes designed with a softer skin and cheerful, human-face features on a digital screen.

Baxter, a cobot from Rethink Robots, has two arms with seven degrees of freedom. Any worker, not just the ones with engineering or computing degrees, can teach it to repeat a new task in minutes simply by showing its arm the pattern it needs to complete it. The tiny UR3 from Universal Robots can be used on a table top. Its single aluminium arm lifts only three kilograms but moves in virtually any direction.

"Get in their way and they will stop," explained Financial Times writer Peggy Hollinger. "Program them with a tablet or simply by moving their arms in the required pattern; no coding is necessary. And if the robot is needed in a different part of the factory — unlike the heavy robotic arms that populate the world's automotive factories and are bolted to the floor — they can be easily moved."

For small and mid-sized companies, those aluminium arms can mean the difference between keeping local jobs and losing them altogether. While there's no question that automation raises difficult questions about the future of human livelihood, industry insiders say the cobots aren't getting enough credit for their ability to protect jobs too, especially at smaller firms competing in a high-tech reality.

Critics also miss the degree to which the cobots change what work means for line employees rather than replacing them. Workers find they don't have to lift heavy parts but continue their assembly duties in much the way they did before; others may discover their job means controlling or guiding the cobot while it completes a difficult or dangerous task – the risks of the job that they don't have to take now.

On the other hand, at least so far, the cobots don't excel at most tasks that need dexterity and feel, or that require the ability to "reprogram" task-oriented thinking on the fly. One MIT study found that human-cobot teams working as partners were 85 percent more productive than either would be alone.

Conventional robots might start out priced as low as $28,000, although some experts warn it may cost three or four times that initially to bring them to a factory floor for the tasks they'll need to complete.

"The robot is really like another fellow worker," says Rethink Robots' Peter Machin in a recent interview. "It's not seen as a threat and we're seeing it actually create employment."