Techman TM12

The TM12 was Techman Robot's move into heavy collaborative work. Shown at Hannover Messe in April 2018 and launched together with the TM14 at IMTS that September, it doubled the reach class the company had until then: 1300 mm of arm carrying 12 kg, against the 946 mm and 4 kg of the TM5-900 that had defined the brand since 2016. It is also, quietly, the quickest machine Techman sells. Average tool speed is 1.3 metres per second, higher than any other arm in the range including the shorter and lighter models, because the long arm converts the same joint rate into more travel at the tool. The base joints turn at 120 degrees per second and the four upper joints at 180. When the company later put 20 kg on the same 1300 mm frame as the TM20, it had to slow the shoulder to 90 degrees per second to do it — so the TM12 remains the arm to choose when cycle time matters more than mass. Stepping up from the TM5 series costs precision. Repeatability is quoted at plus/minus 0.1 mm rather than the plus/minus 0.05 mm of the smaller arms, and that figure holds across the entire heavy range regardless of length. The arm itself weighs 32.8 kg and pairs with a control box of about 14 kg. Everything else follows the house pattern: a 5-megapixel colour camera factory-fitted in the wrist and addressed from TMflow, the flowchart programming environment in which positions are taught by hand guiding; IP54 protection, meaning dust and splashing water but no wash-down; ISO Class 3 cleanroom rating across the series; compliance with ISO 10218-1:2011 and ISO/TS 15066:2016 with collision detection, which permits fenceless operation after a risk assessment. DC-powered TM12X variants drop the camera and add the option of SEMI S2 certification for semiconductor plants. A note on sourcing: Techman publishes no specification table on its product pages and prints its catalogue figures as an image. The numbers here are those documented by Omron, which has resold the platform under its own brand since 2018.

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