Chris Preimesberger for eWeek:  CA Technologies is adding collaborative robot research and development to its already-packed product dance card.

The New York-based company already has bustling businesses in mainframe software, automation, API distribution, security and several others. Nonetheless, on Jan. 17 CA revealed that it is moving to partner on something called cobotics--a collaborative robotics project--by working alongside Finland’s Tampere University of Technology and Finnish IT software and service company Tieto.

The project has been funded jointly by those three organizations along with Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation.

A cobot or co-robot (from “collaborative robot”) is a robot intended to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace. This is in contrast with conventional robots, which are designed to operate autonomously or with limited guidance.

Cobots were invented in 1996 by J. Edward Colgate and Michael Peshkin, professors at Northwestern University. A 1997 U.S. patent filing describes cobots as "an apparatus and method for direct physical interaction between a person and a general purpose manipulator controlled by a computer."  Full Article: