The Smallest Industrial Robots: 45 Tabletop-Class Arms Under 600mm Reach

Forty-five of the 336 robots in our database reach 600mm or less, small enough to work inside a benchtop cell instead of a fenced floor bay. The lightest one in that group, and the lightest robot arm we track at any size, is not a cobot. It’s a 7kg industrial arm from Yaskawa that predates the cobot category by a decade. If you’re sizing a robot for a workspace measured in square feet instead of square meters, the shortlist looks different than the marketing usually suggests.

What counts as tabletop-class in our database

We filtered all 329 robots that publish a reachMm figure (329 of 336, 97.9% coverage) down to those at 600mm or less, the rough threshold where an arm stops needing a floor footprint and starts fitting on or beside a workbench. That leaves 45 robots across 17 brands. SCARA arms dominate the class, 22 of 45 (48.9%), because the format was built for exactly this job, flat pick-and-place and screwdriving work in a small envelope. Traditional articulated arms hold 14 (31.1%), cobots 8 (17.8%), and there’s a single delta robot, FANUC’s M-1iA/0.5S.

Source: performance.reachMm and robotType, all 336 robots in src/content/robots/*.json, filtered to reachMm <= 600 and status: active.

Payload across the whole group runs 0.5kg to 10kg, the range you’d expect for electronics, small-parts assembly, and light dispensing rather than case handling. Application tags back that up directly: 43 of 45 (95.6%) are tagged for assembly, 37 (82.2%) for pick-and-place, 23 for inspection, and 21 for dispensing. Only 3 carry a packaging tag and just 2 are tagged for welding. This is an assembly-and-inspection class of robot, not a general-purpose one.

The lightest robot we track isn’t a cobot

Yaskawa’s MotoMINI weighs 7kg, the lowest weight figure of any of the 336 robots in our database, cobot or not. It’s a conventional six-axis articulated arm, not power-and-force-limited, with a 350mm reach and a 0.5kg payload built for micro-assembly and small-parts handling on a bench. It undercuts every cobot in our tabletop shortlist on weight, including JAKA’s MiniCobo (8.7kg) and ABB’s single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 (9.5kg), both of which are purpose-built collaborative designs.

That’s a useful correction to the assumption that “small and light” automatically means “collaborative.” Weight and reach in this class track the mechanical design more than the safety category: a small conventional arm behind light guarding can end up lighter than a small cobot carrying the extra sensing and compliant joints that let it work fenceless.

Why the smallest-reach robot isn’t the lightest

FANUC’s M-1iA/0.5S has the shortest reach of anything in our database, 280mm, and a payload of just 0.5kg. It also weighs 20kg, more than several arms with double its reach, including the MotoMINI (350mm, 7kg) and Dobot’s MG400 (440mm, 8kg). The reason is structural, not a fluke: the M-1iA is a delta robot, and delta arms carry their motors and drivetrain in a fixed overhead frame rather than distributing mass down a serial arm. That frame adds weight independent of how far the tooling reaches, which is also why delta robots dominate high-speed, small-envelope pick tasks (see our SCARA vs. delta vs. 6-axis breakdown) rather than showing up as the “lightest” option on a spec sheet.

The lesson for a buyer comparing datasheets: reach and weight don’t move together in a straight line, and the mounting geometry (serial arm vs. parallel/delta frame) matters more than the headline reach number when you’re trying to figure out what will physically fit and how much the mount needs to support.

The full shortlist, sorted by reach

Model	Brand	Type	Reach (mm)	Payload (kg)	Weight (kg)
M-1iA/0.5S	FANUC	delta	280	0.5	20
MELFA RH-3FRH	Mitsubishi Electric	scara	300	3	8
G3	Epson Robots	scara	350	3	14
IR-TS4-35Z15S-INT	Inovance	scara	350	4	18.5
MotoMINI	Yaskawa Motoman	articulated	350	0.5	7
IRB 1010	ABB Robotics	articulated	370	1.5	13.5
LS3-B	Epson Robots	scara	400	3	14
T3	Epson Robots	scara	400	3	16
SR-3iA	FANUC	scara	400	3	19
IR-S4-40Z15S3	Inovance	scara	400	4	12
SA4A	Siasun	scara	400	4	13
MG400	Dobot	cobot	440	0.75	8
IRB 910SC-3/0.45	ABB Robotics	scara	450	3	25
Flexion N2	Epson Robots	articulated	450	2.5	19
TS2-40	Stäubli Robotics	scara	460	8.4	38
ER3-500-SR	Estun	scara	500	3	—
IR-S7-50	Inovance	scara	500	7	17
UR3e	Universal Robots	cobot	500	3	11.2
MELFA RV-2FR	Mitsubishi Electric	articulated	504	2	18
MELFA RV-4FR	Mitsubishi Electric	articulated	515	4	22
TX2-40	Stäubli Robotics	articulated	515	2	29
KR 3 AGILUS	KUKA	articulated	541	3	26.5
IR-R4H-54S-INT	Inovance	articulated	546	4	24.5
IRB 920-6/0.55	ABB Robotics	scara	550	6	27
ER4-550-MI	Estun	articulated	550	4	22
IR-TS5-55Z15S-INT	Inovance	scara	550	5	20
YuMi IRB 14000 (dual-arm)	ABB Robotics	cobot	559	0.5	38
YuMi IRB 14050 (single-arm)	ABB Robotics	cobot	559	0.5	9.5
IR-R4-56S5	Inovance	articulated	561	4	24
IRB 1100	ABB Robotics	articulated	580	4	21
SWIFTI CRB 1100-4/0.58	ABB Robotics	cobot	580	4	21
MiniCobo	JAKA	cobot	580	1	8.7
SN4A	Siasun	articulated	580	4	22
Elfin E03	Han’s Robot	cobot	590	3	18
CL103N	Kawasaki Robotics	cobot	590	3	—
XB4	ROKAE	articulated	596	4	32
C4	Epson Robots	articulated	600	4	27
LS10-B	Epson Robots	scara	600	10	22
T6	Epson Robots	scara	600	6	22
ER10-600-SR	Estun	scara	600	10	23
IR-S10-60Z20S-INT	Inovance	scara	600	10	18.5
KR SCARA R600	KUKA	scara	600	8	56
MELFA RH-6FRH	Mitsubishi Electric	scara	600	6	15
eCobra 600	OMRON Robotics	scara	600	5.5	24
TS2-60	Stäubli Robotics	scara	600	8	21

Source: performance and physical.weightKg, all 45 robots, src/content/robots/*.json. Weight coverage is 43 of 45 (95.6%); two models, Estun’s ER3-500-SR and Kawasaki’s CL103N, don’t yet publish a weight figure and are shown as ”—” rather than estimated.

Note the KUKA KR SCARA R600 outlier at the bottom: 600mm reach, the same as several arms weighing half as much, but 56kg, the heaviest robot in the whole shortlist by a wide margin. It’s built on a heavier-duty base than the rest of the compact-SCARA field, worth checking before assuming every 600mm-class arm needs the same bench or stand.

Mounting flexibility: floor isn’t the only option

Floor mounting is still the default, 43 of 45 (95.6%) support it, but a meaningful share of this class can also be hung. 25 of 45 (55.6%) support ceiling mounting and 16 (35.6%) support wall mounting, with 6 supporting a tilted mount. For a buyer genuinely tight on floor space, that matters more than it sounds: a ceiling- or wall-mounted arm working over or beside a fixture can shrink the footprint further than a floor-mounted arm of the same reach, at the cost of needing structural support built into the cell rather than just a stand. Check our robot mounting options guide before assuming floor is the only path.

What a compact class actually buys you

None of the 45 robots here publish a footprintMm figure in our database (a gap across almost the entire 336-robot catalog, not specific to this class), so we’re not claiming a per-model base-plate size. What the reach and weight data does support is directional: per our floor-space-by-type analysis, swept work area scales with the square of reach, so a 500mm-reach arm sweeps roughly a quarter of the area a 1000mm arm does, before any clearance is added. Cutting reach in half is closer to a 4x floor-area reduction than a 2x one. That’s the real argument for a tabletop-class robot over a downsized general-purpose arm: the space savings compound faster than the reach number suggests.

Cost tracks a similar logic industry-wide. External market data puts a typical SMB cobot deployment at roughly $10,000 to $50,000 for the arm itself, with lightweight 3 to 5kg payload classes and Universal Robots’ own compact UR3e (500mm reach, 3kg payload, in this shortlist) frequently cited as a standard benchtop entry point for tight workspaces (Standard Bots, Universal Robots). We don’t hold pricing data ourselves, all our listings are “price on application,” so treat that range as external context, not a number to quote against any specific model here.

Choosing between the shortlist and a full-size arm

If your part or product weighs under roughly 10kg and the robot never needs to reach past 600mm to do the job, this shortlist is the field to shop from rather than a downsized version of a full industrial arm. Assembly, pick-and-place, inspection, and dispensing cover 96% of the applications tagged across these 45 robots, so if your task falls outside that set, especially anything closer to machine tending, material handling, or heavier packaging, check the broader reach-by-type comparison and cobot vs. industrial robot guide before narrowing to a compact arm on reach alone. SCARA remains the default format for this class for a reason: it was purpose-built for exactly the flat, repetitive, small-envelope work that dominates the application tags here, and 22 of the 45 tabletop-class robots we track are SCARA arms.

Sources: Standard Bots — small industrial robot arms, Universal Robots — UR3e.

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