Inside the SMT line, machines print, place, solder and inspect. Once your step and the picture changes: people load test and programming stations, drive screws, fit modules, route cables and pack boards.
That’s not because the electronics industry avoids automation. In fact, it’s the largest segment for robotics, with new installations in 2025 making up 24% of the world total, according to International Federation of Robotics. Most of these robots, though, run fast, fixed, high-volume tasks. The work around the line changes more often, runs at lower volume or needs a careful touch, and that’s where industrial cobots fit.
Three pressures are pushing automation beyond the SMT line:
Consistency. A defect costs more the further it travels: a mis-loaded board or a loose screw caught at the station is cheap: found in test, it’s rework, and when found in the field, it’s a return and a customer problem. Manual handling and inspection vary across a shift, as fatigue sets in. A cobot does the last cycle of a shift the way it did the first.
Staffing. The jobs around the line, such as loading, packing, screwdriving and inspecting, are repetitive and often hard to staff. Automating these tasks frees skilled people for higher-value work that demands human judgement.
Product mix. EMS providers juggle many customers, with frequent product changeover. As a result, automation must change with them, so cells that be reprogrammed and moved rather than rebuilt are favored.
Flex, a global leader in electronic manufacturing services, has built a standardized automation platform deployed across its worldwide facilities, serving customers in automotive, industrial, healthcare, lifestyle, communications, enterprise and cloud markets. The platform uses collaborative industrial robots and AMRs to automate “difficult, tedious and precision tasks” whenever needed.
During the development cycle, the Flex Automation team researched and tested several cobots for us in the integration of its platform. Teradyne Robotics has become one of our strategic automation partners, and we are now deploying these solutions across Flex facilities.
Cobots show up at many points around an electronics line. The map below groups the most common tasks by where they happen.
This guide looks closely at two of those jobs, station loading and end-of-line packing, through manufacturers that handed them to Universal Robots cobots.
This guide looks at two of them in depth, screwdriving and insertion, shows how electronics manufacturers handed them to cobots, and helps you judge which of your steps are ready.
Most electronics manufacturers begin with one well-defined task and expand from there. A common path:
The pattern shows in the examples: Siemens’ Erlangen plant started with one cobot in 2017 and now runs more than 70, and YUEYIN added four cobots across three stations.
A few decisions shape most electronics projects early. First, the tool: boards, modules, screws and connectors each need the right gripper, often from a UR partner. Second, how parts arrive: trays, stacks and fixtures keep a cell simple, while mixed parts need vision. Then there’s how the cell connects to the station it tends and to your MES or traceability systems, which often decides whether a pilot becomes a rollout.
Vision is often where AI enters the picture. Finding parts and guiding the robot to them is already established in industry. Vision technology has developed rapidly. AI-guided cable routing and connector insertions has so far been shown in benchmarks and demonstrations.
The broader shift is toward robots that learn tasks rather than follow programmed paths. Flex is one provider moving the same way: “We are working closely with partners like Teradyne Robotics on use cases where physical AI can be applied within complex assembly cells.”
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Then pick the guide that matches your answers or talk it through with us.
