Techman TM5-900
Techman Robot · Taiwan · 2016
The cobot that arrived with a camera already in the wrist. Reach 946 mm, payload 4 kg — despite the 5 in its name and the 900 in its number, neither of which matches the datasheet.
The TM5-900 is the long-arm variant of the model Techman Robot launched in 2016, the machine that established the company's one distinguishing idea: the vision system is not an accessory. A camera sits in the wrist of every arm the company sells, calibrated at the factory and addressed from the same graphical programming environment that moves the joints. Competing cobots of that generation were sold as bare arms, with vision bought separately from a third party and integrated by a systems house. The arm carries 4 kg over a 946 mm reach and weighs 22 kg, with six axes and IP54 protection. Those numbers deserve a careful read, because the product name misleads twice. The 5 is a series designation, not the payload: the shorter TM5-700 in the same family carries 6 kg, half again as much as this one, and the difference comes from the leverage of the longer arm rather than from any change in the drive train. The 900 is not the reach either — the datasheet says 946 mm, as the 700 variant reaches 746 mm. A buyer sizing a cell from the model number alone will be wrong on both counts. IP54 places the machine indoors, in dry assembly and inspection work. It withstands dust and splashing water but not a hose-down, which is what separates this series from the later S line rated IP65. Techman states compliance with ISO 10218-1:2011 and ISO/TS 15066:2016, the technical specification that governs how much force a robot may apply to a human in a shared workspace, and the arm stops on contact detection, so it can work next to people without fencing after a site risk assessment. Programming runs through TMflow, a flow-based graphical environment where a task is assembled from function nodes rather than written as code, with positions taught by pulling the arm by hand and vision calibrated against a printed board. That combination — factory vision plus no-code teaching — is why the TM5 won design awards in 2018 and why Omron formed a strategic alliance with the company the same year and resells the platform under its own name. Techman Robot itself is worth knowing. Founded in 2015 as a spin-out of Quanta Storage, part of the Quanta Computer group, it is the only collaborative-robot manufacturer based in Taiwan, developing and building everything there, and it listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2025. The TM5 remains in the catalogue nine years after launch, alongside the heavier TM12 through TM20 models and the newer S series.
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