Highly versatile and portable collaborative robots (cobots) can greatly enhance production operations. Optimized for safety and designed to work with or near human workers potentially without a hard safety enclosure, cobots can now be programmed by novice users to perform a broad range of tasks, especially for smaller batches. They are well suited for fast deployment and redeployment on demand. With the shift from centralized manufacturing to distributed manufacturing systems (DMS), cobots are gaining popularity because they enable greater flexibility in production processes while lowering supply chain costs. Complicated end-user demands also put a premium on valuable factory floorspace, giving shops another reason to start using collaborative automation that can function with limited safety components based on a risk assessment.