Last week, Design World took a moment to catch up with Chieftek Precision USA Product Marketing Specialist Henry Chou on the show floor at IMTS. Here’s what he had to say.
What is it about big arms? On the beach, in an action film, or in the robotics industry — the larger arms get all the attention. It’s at least part of the reason why companies like Universal Robots, ABB, and Yaskawa are always in the news and on social media feeds. They’re household names even outside engineering circles. But who are the major players engineers look to when an application specifically calls for miniature-sized robot arms? Arms that are small, accurate, and robust despite their size? For those jobs, there are companies that make their bread with products that do very specific things at a very high level.
Take miniature linear motion components specialist Chieftek Precision USA, for example. For miniature product sales, by volume, Chieftek is near the top, competing with the likes of larger competitors like IKO and Misumi. How are they doing it? And what is the plan for the remainder of 2024 and beyond? I spoke with Chieftek’s Henry Chou in Chicago at IMTS 2024 to see what keeps the company competitive and what their strategy looks like for the next few months and into the new year. Below is a slightly condensed version of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Design World: Chieftek seems to know its niche and focuses on doing the little things well within that space. Is that fair to say?
Henry Chou: Our company’s general policy is that we want our products to be mighty small, mighty powerful, right? We pride ourselves on being the industry leaders on the miniature side of the industry. And for our robot arms, we knew that there was already a very saturated market in terms of companies trying to fill the large voids of robot arms, but there’s a very, very sharp, noticeable niche for miniature-size robot arms.

The Chieftek DB0.
Of the ones that are available, they’re small. For example, UR’s UR3. They are very inaccurate, and very cheap, but they’re not meant for any kind of accuracy at all. They’re like little hobby arms, right? They’re good enough if you want to perhaps have a showpiece to show people how small you can make it. But they’re not really suited for any type of precise industry at all. So, we designed our DB0 industrial and our S0 collaborative robots to fit that niche, and our overall goal is to make it even smaller in the future. We’re still developing these as we go along. The next short-term goal will be to raise the load ceiling from about one kilo to something coming within a range of two kilos. Eventually, the overall goal is to maybe even make it even smaller — going further down, with greater miniaturization, instead of going up.
DW: Is this something on the agenda right now? Perhaps, for 2025?
HC: 2025 looks like even more of a trend toward intelligent, independent machines. And this is, of course, going to be even more focused on the miniaturization side simply because you need the chips to run those machines now, right? We’re probably going to see, at least I’m hoping we’re going to see, an increase in the need for either some sort of automation or increased production in terms of light payload, precise manufacturing, i.e. chips, right? We’re hoping that this is a niche we grow into, either people designing the smaller stages that they need using our miniature guides, or just replacing the entire process with what we hope will be our S0 robot arms.
DW: You mentioned chips a minute ago. Could you tell me more about those applications for your products and maybe some others?
HC: Like I said before, in terms of microchip assembly, maybe even electronic assembly, you have the little fiddly pieces that go onto another board. You can easily have one of our machines pick up those little things, go to where it’s supposed to be, put it in, and repeat and repeat as needed. And then those can be shifted onto another station to be soldered or something like that? Or you can just use our automatic tool rack system, and we have four tools there. You can literally just have this one station do four different things, because a robot will pick up one tool, do that, replace that tool, and then it’s programmed to pick up another tool, do that, and then rinse and repeat until all four processes are done. With this, you could drastically shorten your assembly line. Instead of having 40 stations, you might have 10 stations because each station does four things.

The Chieftek S0.
Another possibility would be in the medical field, in terms of laboratory automation. If you need something to work in a fume hood, which, by necessity is a very space-limited thing, right? You can have one of our S0’s, with its superior pathfinding, put in the middle of the fume, and it can reach either side of the fume hood without breaching the boundaries because it’ll fold up back in on itself to reach the other side.
The other two examples are in the medical field. Back in Taiwan, we’ve used the S0 in the assistance of blood drawing. We’ve also had a doctor use the teach-in method and program the robot to move in a certain way to assist with the physical rehabilitation of a patient’s arm.
DW: What’s unique about your products? What separates you from some of the others in your industry?
HC: So if you buy one of our arms, you don’t have to buy a specific driver to go with it. Any driver in the industry works. You don’t have to use our software. We provide it, but you don’t have to use it. If you have something in the factory, and you want to use, it doesn’t necessarily have to be from us. As long as whatever you design fits, fits our head, fits our very standard IO six-pin head — you could fit it onto the end.
It’s the same philosophy when we make our linear guides, right? We have the capability of creating a complete actuator with drivers and all that. And we do provide the drivers in our own brand drivers. But again, we’re not hard-locked. Any driver on the market can run our actuators. And so, I think that would be the general difference between us. A lot of the companies try to lock you into their own environment, right? They want you to use them for everything. We try to make it so that you can design around us, so that we are literally just one component in the overall system. And we will support you as much as you want. We could design your whole system… or just part of your system. We’re here.
Chieftek
www.chieftek.com
Filed Under: Robotics • robotic grippers • end effectors