Universal Robots' two best-known cobots gained 2.5 kg each without a single new part

Anyone looking today for a UR5e or a UR10e on the maker's website ends up on the general product listing. Both pages redirect, while the UR3e and UR16e pages still answer at their own addresses — which rules out a site rebuild and points at something else. The two most widely installed collaborative arms in the world left the catalogue under those names on 12 May 2025. They did not leave the factory. At the Automate fair in Detroit, alongside the launch of the faster UR15, Universal Robots announced that the UR5e would be sold as the UR7e and the UR10e as the UR12e. The company's own wording was that it was introducing clearer names and more power where it counts. Deliveries of both were declared immediate, and the e-Series line-up became UR3e, UR7e, UR12e and UR16e. Put the old and the new technical data sheets side by side and the interesting part appears: on the mechanical side, nothing moved. The UR7e weighs 20.6 kg with its cable, reaches 850 mm, stands on a base 151 mm across, repeats a pose to within 0.03 mm per ISO 9283, tops out at 4 m/s at the tool centre point and draws 570 W at maximum — every one of those figures matches the UR5e document. The UR12e repeats the UR10e in the same way: 33.5 kg, 1,300 mm, a 190 mm base, 0.05 mm of repeatability, 615 W, and a force-torque sensor rated to 100 N and 10 Nm. Universal Robots states that accessories, URCaps and application kits transfer unchanged and that installed systems need no modification. What changed is the label. The smaller arm now carries a 7.5 kg rating instead of 5 kg — an increase of half again on a machine whose parts are the same. The larger one gained nothing at all in 2025: it had been rated at 12.5 kg since an enhanced version announced on 17 May 2021, sold at an unchanged price, so for four years its name understated its lifting capacity by a fifth. The 2025 announcement corrected a number that had been wrong since then. For a buyer the practical consequence is small but real. A quotation, a risk assessment or an integrator's cell drawing dated before May 2025 will name a robot that no longer appears in any price list, and a specification written around a 5 kg limit is being met by an arm the maker now certifies for 7.5 kg. For a catalogue like this one the consequence is a rule worth remembering: a model vanishing from a manufacturer's menu does not always mean the machine was discontinued. Sometimes it means only that the marketing department finally read the data sheet.