Collaborative Robots Begin to Take Their Place at 3C Screw-Removal Stations: The Reality and the Limits of Flexibility

Through 2026 a fairly visible change has appeared on 3C electronics lines: collaborative robots are no longer confined to peripheral tasks such as handling and loading, but are starting to enter fastening and removal — the core stations that act directly on the workpiece.

The reasons are not complicated. 3C products iterate fast, run in small batches and change over frequently, while dedicated machines often need tooling redesigned or even a whole line section reworked at changeover, which costs both money and time. The inherent flexibility of a cobot — moderate payload, hand-guiding, a higher safety rating, the ability to share a station with people — maps neatly onto this many-model, small-batch rhythm. With a driver or screw-feeding module on its end effector, one cobot can both fasten and remove, and a changeover mostly means adjusting the program and the end tool rather than starting over.

But flexibility does not mean it can do everything. In something like an M0.8-M2.0 screw removal solution, a cobot meets quite specific constraints, roughly three of them. First, accuracy: a cobot's own repeatability is typically in the ±0.02–0.05 mm range, while micro-screw recesses are shallow with a small contact area for the bit and are sensitive to coaxiality and perpendicularity — body accuracy alone is not enough to seat the bit reliably. Second, rigidity: both tightening and backing out generate reaction torque, and the compliance of cobot joints becomes a burden here, requiring force control or a floating mechanism to compensate. Third, cycle time: cobot motion is usually slower than Cartesian or dedicated mechanisms, and is not necessarily an advantage on lines chasing high takt.

So the more practical approach is division of labour rather than replacement: let the cobot handle what genuinely needs flexibility — loading, multi-model changeover, handling parts in irregular poses — and give the highest-accuracy, highest-rigidity fastening and removal motions to a Cartesian platform or dedicated small screw removal equipment. Combined, they keep changeover flexibility without sacrificing process stability.

This also explains an observable pattern: on 3C removal stations, what lands first is usually not "a robot driving screws directly" but "a robot plus a dedicated removal module." The module handles alignment, torque control and screw pick-and-place; the robot only has to bring it into position. That sidesteps the body's accuracy and rigidity limits while gaining the ability to run multiple models on one line.

For manufacturers, deciding whether a cobot suits a given removal operation comes down to three questions: how often does the workpiece change over? How narrow are the per-point accuracy and torque windows? Does the takt requirement allow for the cobot body's speed ceiling? Where changeover is frequent, the torque window is narrow and takt pressure is modest, a cobot plus a dedicated removal module is often the better-value combination; where takt is the first priority, dedicated in-line equipment remains the better fit.

Shenzhen Honred Technology has long experience in automatic screw driving and combined drive-and-remove equipment. Its automatic vision screw removal machine and vision fastening modules can serve as the dedicated module at a removal station, working alongside a cobot or a Cartesian platform, with non-standard customisation to the product structure — a reference point when weighing flexibility against stability.