igus is now delivering the ReBeL service robot, which is also available as a smart version. At a price of 4,970 euros for the plug-and-play variant and weighing only around eight kilograms, customers receive one of the lightest cobots on the market. Digital services such as the RBTXpert and new online offers enable customers to have complete automation solutions in just a few days and for little money.

The centerpiece is the world's first industrial-strength cobot gearbox made of plastic. “Behind these numbers are 1,041 tests in our in-house laboratory since 2019, in which we have carried out tribological and thermodynamic tests on 15 material pairings and tolerance chains. A particularly big challenge was generating heat in the fully integrated wave gears that the motor influences thermally. During development, we therefore also concentrated on larger motors and better efficiency in order to significantly reduce heat generation,” says Alexander Mühlens, head of the low-cost automation division at igus. “As a result, we were able to achieve continuous improvements and ultimately even quintuple the number of cycles to two million. That corresponds to a typical service life of two years.”