Speed reducers are the key

I have been thinking for a while on how to write a good article about why now is the critical time to be disrupting the high precision speed reducer market, and Nikkei's Asian Review has gone ahead and done a great job of laying down the key points for me.

Right now, there are several major things that point me (and it appears a few others) into viewing the speed reducer as the key bottleneck for industrial robots.

1. The first, and one of the biggest, is that the large incumbent manufacturers, like Harmonic Drive, Nabtesco Motion Control, and Sumitomo are being swamped with orders; even as more plant capacity is coming online, that capacity immediately reaches saturation. That is a huge indicator of pent up demand underlying for 'more and better' drives to be made available.
2. The next point is the emerging challengers for the incumbents, both Nidec-Shimpo  & Leader Precision Drive Ltd. are making rapid gains in the market as their experience increases. This is partly driven by strain wave gears now being most part free to develop, having finally reached the end of their key patent lives. Harmonic Drive is still the undisputed top-quality maker of these drives, but now that their competition is free to sell, I expect quality there to rise, while HD has to fight aggressively on cost. What is interesting is that HD, Nabtesco, & Sumitomo remained swamped with orders even as their competition also is increasing exponentially.
3. New drive technologies are being acquired very early on in their lives. Nidec-Shimpo is using a slick new traction drive (thanks for helping prove our market, by the way), Harmonic Drive has acquired the rights to the new Abacus drive from SRI, while Koch Industries snapped up a controlling interest in Genesis Robotics to acquire their direct LiveDrive system.
4. Traditional industrial robot sales are growing 'like crazy' - IFR is expecting 15% or better year-on-year growth in traditional industrial robots, at least for the next decade. This is being driven in large part by the heavy investments Chinese manufacturers are making into automation, with China on pace to become a larger market than Europe & the Americas combined.
5. Cobots, AGVs, and non-traditional robots are going to explode. Cobots are still looking for their killer app, but every major manufacturer is investing heavily in the technology. When you combine a high quality cobot, with the ease of use that Rethink & Universal Robots have, there is a potential client base of every small industrial & commercial company in the world sitting there as a mostly untapped market. The first major player to hit the sweet spot of intuitive to set up, intuitive to use, industrial quality, and reasonable price is going to clean up the field. Likewise, demand on the life & performance of AGVs, particularly in logistics and exterior environments is going to ratchet quickly. Again, once they solve a few remaining challenges, the potential customer base expands massively.
6. The existing technology is very mature - and that is creating a bit of a bottleneck with thinking of new robotics applications. This is in no way, shape, or form a criticism of Harmonic of Cycloidal technology; both are fantastic solutions. But I don't think that anyone is expecting any earth-shaking improvements out of either of those technologies. That is inherently limiting to robotics developers. They 'know' what the limits of technology are, so there are countless good ideas being bounced off of the wall of 'that just isn't practical'. What the field needs is to open up the space to play and explore, that is starting to happen now with the fantastic LiveDrive from Genesis and their great speed/accuracy combination, and with our own Archimedes Drive, with our impossible gear ratios, torque density, and stellar accuracy. I don't know what the great engineers at ABB, Comau, or Yaskawa are going to do with sub arc-second accuracy - but I would put my last dollar that they would love to have it.

So that is my round up of 'why' speed reducers are going to be the least sexy, most important component for the future of robotics.