Robotics is one of the key innovation areas worldwide and is seeing significant changes in the way robots are used. In this talk we will try to highlight the dominant changes as seen from an industrial perspective of a robot manufacturer. Then we will focus on the technical details of the most significant change - the change of the robot's predominant use. Years ago, robots were fenced means of production, that from their first day moved close to perfection to follow their path and reach the specified points in the workspace with utmost accuracy. Motion control was the dominating feature of each robot! In light of human robot collaboration, these fences will soon go away and humans and robots will move much closer together, i.e. the robot will interact with its environment much more than before. It does not really matter where the robot is performing its task, but it needs to complete it. This is particularly relevant for assembly operations of small parts.

We will highlight the challenges that arise from this and show two ingredients needed on the control side to overcome these – highly-performant admittance control and force/torque estimation at the TCP. Both will be shown to be implementable on a commercially available product - YuMi, ABB's truly collaborative robot.