JAKA Zu3
JAKA Robotics · China · 2017
The smallest arm in JAKA's original Zu family: 3 kg of payload, 626 mm of reach and a repeatability of ±0.02 mm, tighter than most cobots twice its price. It ships without a teach pendant — the robot is programmed from a phone, tablet or laptop.
This is the first robot from JAKA Robotics in this catalogue. The Shanghai company was founded in 2014 out of a packaging-automation business and launched the Zu series of collaborative arms in 2017, showing them at the 19th China International Industry Fair. JAKA marketed them as "wireless" cobots, and that word describes the one design decision that still sets the family apart: there is no teach pendant in the box. Programming is done from a mobile terminal — a phone, tablet or laptop — using a graphical editor and hand-guided freedrive teaching. The Zu3 is the entry point of that family. It carries 3 kg, reaches 626 mm, weighs 12 kg including cables and stands on a footprint 158 mm across. Typical power draw is 350 W and the arm is sealed to IP54; the control cabinet is a separate IP44 box measuring 410 × 307 × 235 mm and weighing 13.5 kg, with 16 digital inputs, 16 digital outputs and two configurable analogue channels, speaking Modbus TCP and RTU, PROFINET and EtherNet/IP. The number worth pausing on is repeatability: ±0.02 mm. That is the same figure FANUC quotes for its 3 kg CRX-3iA and appreciably tighter than the ±0.05 mm Universal Robots publishes for its current flagship UR15. Small arms are inherently easier to hold still — precision in this class tracks arm length far more closely than it tracks brand or price — but among sub-5 kg cobots the Zu3 sits at the sharp end of the published range. JAKA has also become the subject of a legal fight worth knowing about: Teradyne, the owner of Universal Robots, has sued the company at the Unified Patent Court in Europe over alleged patent infringement, in a forum whose single ruling applies across 17 EU states. No judgment has been issued. What this profile deliberately does not state: joint speeds, maximum tool speed and a list price, because JAKA publishes none of them for this model. The manufacturer's own parameter table is also shifted by one row — the field labelled "Degree of freedom" shows a programming method rather than a number, and a field labelled "Humidity" shows the tool I/O count. Those rows have been read against the rest of the series rather than copied. The arm has six rotary axes, as JAKA states for the newer Zu35.
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