"Cobot": between innovation and technological illusion

In the 2010s, European industry experienced a wave of innovation that, originating in Germany, spread across the rest of the continent: Industry 4.0. Hailed as the industrial revolution of the third millennium, this new era of industry is characterized by the digitization of the factory and the rise of the IoT (Internet of Things), and promises humans a central role. This promise is being renewed and reinforced in the 2020s by Industry 5.0, whose definition oscillates between a new revolution and a continuation of the same wave of innovation in the wake of Industry 4.0. Industry 5.0 aims to leverage AI, XR (“extended reality,” a broad term encompassing virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality), and robotics to increase factory productivity while improving the lives of operators, who are now at the center of the production chain. Thus, these visions of the new industry herald both a technological and a human revolution: thanks to technology, factory work becomes less arduous, less dangerous, and refocuses on high-value-added tasks. Within this techno-positivist discourse, one technical device holds a special place: the cobot, or collaborative robot. This neologism emerged in the late 1990s to describe a robot designed to work in synergy with humans. Unknown to the general public until the early 2010s, this term has become central to this new, more human-centered industry. Unlike the traditional industrial robot, which must be enclosed behind a cage and operate autonomously, the cobot is positioned alongside people, works with them, and relieves them of the most repetitive tasks. This represents a profound technical shift in the nature of the robot: from an object performing an automatic action, it transforms into an ontologically different entity, now performing an act of assistance. In this sense, this change can be considered revolutionary.

This vision of industry, along with the revolutionary role and use of this collaborative robot, is so compelling that it warrants closer examination. This scrutiny is all the more relevant given the ambiguity that may surround this new discipline known as “cobotics” or “collaborative robotics”—a term that describes technological systems that have varied considerably over time, while maintaining the same goal of collaboration with humans. This article poses the following question: Does the cobot herald a major paradigm shift in industrial production by fostering collaboration between humans and machines? To answer this question, it is worthwhile to analyze the cobot not only from a technical perspective but also from an epistemological one. The aim is to trace the research that led to the emergence of this technology, to recall the context in which it is developing, and to examine the applications it is intended to address as well as those for which it is actually...