The UK operation of Danish collaborative-robot maker Universal Robots, with a showroom and training centre in Sheffield, its first UK office.
Universal Robots makes collaborative robots, or cobots. These are lightweight robot arms designed to work safely next to people without cages, and to be set up and programmed by ordinary factory staff rather than only by specialists. Its cobots handle jobs such as picking, packing, screwing, polishing and machine tending. The company reports that it has delivered 100,000 cobots worldwide. In the UK it sells mostly through partner companies called distributors and integrators.
Three people founded the company in 2005: Esben Østergaard, Kasper Støy and Kristian Kassow, who met at the University of Southern Denmark. Their aim was to make robots affordable and easy to use for small and medium-sized businesses. The company's own mission, as stated on its history page, is "automation for everyone, everywhere" (translated from the Italian version of the page). Teradyne bought the company in 2015, and it still trades under the Universal Robots name. UK country manager Mark Gray has described the goal as taking on jobs that are "dirty, dangerous and dull" so people can focus on higher-value work.
The UK team has its first UK office in Sheffield, Yorkshire, where it has a showroom and training centre. Gray said the hope was that it would start a Yorkshire robotics cluster, and that it would host training and meetings that link developers, distributors and manufacturers. The date of the opening was not given in the article we read. In 2020 the company also signed a Scottish partner, SP Automation & Robotics in Dundee, which shows how the UK business works through regional partners.
The company runs an academy that offers training, and it has a partner scheme called UR+ where other companies build add-ons for its robots; both launched in 2016 according to its history page. We found no culture statement from the UK office, so we make no claims about working life there. The group opened a joint headquarters in Odense, Denmark, in 2024 with its sister company MiR, designed for 600 employees.
Jobs in a business like this include application engineers who help customers set up cobots, sales and account managers, trainers, technical support staff and marketing roles. Sheffield has a strong research community in cobots, which a 2020s trade podcast described as a hot spot. If you want to see robots that anyone can learn to program, this is a good company to follow.
Website: www.universal-robots.com
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