Assessing the Impact of Cobots on Productivity, Ergonomics, and System Flexibility: A Comprehensive Review
TL;DR
The review indicates that cobots can reduce physical workload and improve selected productivity indicators in appropriate repetitive and moderate-payload applications, while productivity effects remain highly context dependent.
Abstract
Collaborative robots (cobots) are increasingly used alongside human workers as an intermediate approach between manual production and fully isolated industrial automation. Existing literature frequently evaluates productivity, ergonomics, and manufacturing flexibility as separate outcomes, making it difficult to identify trade-offs that arise when a cobot is integrated into a real workstation. This review critically synthesises evidence across these three dimensions and examines the conditions under which improvement in one dimension may affect another. A structured, PRISMA-informed narrative review approach was used to identify and synthesise literature from major scientific and technical sources, with priority given to publications from 2016–2026 and earlier foundational sources where they underpin established assessment methods or concepts. The review indicates that cobots can reduce physical workload and improve selected productivity indicators in appropriate repetitive and moderate-payload applications, while productivity effects remain highly context dependent. Ergonomic benefits are more consistently reported for physical workload than for cognitive workload, because monitoring, pacing, trust, and safety concerns can introduce additional mental demands. Flexibility benefits are most evident in high-mix, low-volume and frequently reconfigured manufacturing environments, although payload, speed, safety, and integration constraints limit the advantage. A major research gap is the limited number of studies that evaluate productivity, ergonomics, and flexibility simultaneously within the same workstation or production system. The review therefore proposes an integrated conceptual framework and a candidate set of key performance indicators for future empirical studies. The findings support treating cobot adoption as a joint task-, workstation-, and organisational-design decision rather than as a simple technology substitution.