Flexiv Rizon 4
Flexiv · United States · 2019
The arm Flexiv built its company on: seven axes, 4 kg of payload on an 876 mm reach, and force sensing down to 0.1 N across the whole body. Soft-launched at Hannover Messe in April 2019 as the first adaptive robot.
Rizon 4 is the original member of Flexiv's adaptive robot family and the machine the company was founded to build. Flexiv started work on adaptive robots in June 2016 in Santa Clara, made the first Rizon prototype in Silicon Valley in October 2017, and soft-launched the finished arm at Hannover Messe in April 2019; trial production at its South China factory followed in November of that year. The selling point is not payload but touch. Rizon carries seven rotary axes rather than the usual six, which lets it hold a chosen force-control posture while still reaching around obstacles, and Flexiv rates whole-body force sensing at 0.1 N with a maximum tool-point force of 200 N. Direct force control, hybrid motion-force control, disturbance rejection and multi-point whole-body contact are all listed as core functions rather than options — the arm is sold as a machine that works by feel, for grinding, polishing, assembly with tight fits and product testing. The numbers around that are ordinary in the best sense: 4 kg payload, 876 mm reach, 20 kg arm, pose repeatability of ±0.05 mm to ISO 9283, IP65 sealing, 0 to 45 °C, under 70 dB, a standard ISO 9409-1-50-4-M6 tool flange and a typical tool speed of 1.0 m/s. It mounts at any angle, including on an AMR or AGV as a mobile workstation. Control sits in the separate Hesper cabinet: 12 kg, 500 W, IP20, 423 × 230 × 230 mm, 16 digital inputs and 16 digital outputs, PROFINET and Modbus TCP/IP. Programming is a drag-and-drop teach pendant running Flexiv Elements, with the Flexiv RDK and a ROS 2 driver for developers. Two dates are worth keeping: in April 2020 the design took an iF Design Award and a German Innovation Award, and in November 2021 Flexiv described Rizon 4 as the first seven-axis force-controlled adaptive robot to hold both CE and ETL certification. What the manufacturer does not publish, this profile does not invent: there are no joint speeds, no arm power figure, no safety performance level and no list price on the specification table. Secondary listings that credit Rizon 4 with a 780 mm reach disagree with the manufacturer's own table, which says 876 mm.
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