CRX-3iA
FANUC · Japan · 2026
The lightest collaborative arm FANUC has ever built: 11 kg of robot for a 3 kg payload, held down by a magnet instead of bolts. It works out its own mounting angle, and after being carried to a new bench it finds its position by touching a wall with the welding wire — no re-teaching.
The CRX-3iA is the smallest and newest member of FANUC's CRX collaborative family, shown in December 2025 and in mass production since January 2026; FANUC America put it on the North American market on 20 April 2026. It is the first FANUC robot in this catalogue, which is an omission worth naming: FANUC has more industrial robots installed worldwide than any other manufacturer. The headline is not the payload but the mass. The arm weighs 11 kg and carries 3 kg over a 692 mm reach. Its nearest sibling, the CRX-5iA, weighs 25 kg for 5 kg of payload — so FANUC took 56 percent of the weight out in exchange for 40 percent of the capacity. That ratio is the entire point. A cobot light enough to be carried in one hand stops being an installation and becomes a tool that moves to the work. The mechanics follow from that. There are no anchor bolts: the robot sits on a magnetic base and can be mounted floor, wall, ceiling or at an angle, in any orientation, because it detects its own installation angle instead of being told. After a move, the operator touches a wall with the torch wire and the robot recognises where it now stands, so the taught program survives the relocation. The 3 kg payload is sized deliberately: it is enough to hold a welding torch and a seam sensor at the same time, which lets the robot find the weld point and generate the path itself rather than replay a fixed trajectory. The numbers are unusually good for the bottom of a range. Repeatability is ±0.02 mm against ±0.03 mm on the larger CRX-5iA, and it is also the faster of the two: 1,200 mm/s in collaborative mode and 2,500 mm/s in high-speed mode, against 1,000 and 2,000 mm/s. Six axes, IP67 sealing on the wrist and J3 arm with IP67 optional on the body, and the compact R-30iB Mini Plus controller from the R-30iB Plus series. FANUC quotes the robot per configuration and publishes no list price. FANUC positions it for welding, small assembly, screwdriving, tool positioning and inspection, and names shipbuilding explicitly — large structures where the part cannot come to the robot, so the robot has to come to the part.
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