n NEWS September 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com 8 SHIPMENTS OF COLLABORATIVE robots (cobots) will almost double between 2025 and 2030, expanding at an average annual rate of 17.3%, according to a new report from Interact Analysis. The growth is being driven by a combination of factors including equipment upgrades in electronics manufacturing, cyclical recoveries in the semiconductor industry, the increasing use of automation in logistics and warehousing, improved safety, easier operation, and falling cobot prices. In 2025, global shipments of cobots rose by 14.5% to hit around 57,000, while revenues climbed by 10.5%, from around $1.1bn to more than $1.2bn. Between 2025-30, Interact predicts that global cobot revenues will grow by an annual average of 13.6%, to reach more than $2.3bn in 2030, when it expects 128,918 cobots to be shipped. It attributes the gap between shipment and revenue growth rates to falling average prices for cobots. However, the rate of decline is predicted slow due to the stabilisation of the price war in China, and escalating manufacturing costs in Europe and the US. China continues to dominate the global cobot market, with its growth outpacing other major regions. Interact reports that China’s share of global cobot revenues rose from 28.9% in 2018 to 54.7% in 2025, and predicts that it could reach 61.4% by 2030. By contrast, it expects EMEA’s market share to drop from 18.1% to 13.5% by 2030, and to be overtaken by the Americas. Interact suggests that industry is shifting towards medium- and high-payload cobots. Traditionally, cobots have focused on payloads below 10kg, but the market is moving to larger payloads – including machines with capacities above 20kg – blurring the lines between industrial and collaborative robots. Cobot sales could double by 2030 A GROUP OF US GOVERNMENT agencies have issued a warning of an active cyberthreat to Siemens S7 series PLCs in which the attackers are using AI-generated scripts, disguised as legitimate monitoring tools, to find Internet-exposed PLCs that are poorly protected or running outdated software. They say that this use of AI represents “an evolution in threat actor capabilities, dramatically reducing the technical expertise and time required to develop working ICS exploitation scripts and malicious tools”. In addition, AI allows the attackers to leverage additional attack vectors rapidly, and to adapt to defensive measures. The threat actors can easily collect public information about vulnerabilities and weaknesses, find exposed and exploitable PLCs, and use AI-generated scripts to act on this information. The agencies warn that exploitation of poorly protected PLCs could lead to disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, compliance violations, and cascading impacts across interconnected systems,. “If PLCs are exposed to the Internet, they are at high risk for exploitation,” they say. “This is not a theoretical risk – it is an active threat.” The agencies – which include the NSA (National Security Agency), Cisa (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), DoE (Department of Energy) and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) – recently issued another warning about cyberattacks by “Iran-affiliated cyberactors” on PLCs used in critical infrastructure applications. This warning was followed by reports of cyberattacks on water utilities in at least seven US states. The latest warning does not identify the potential attackers, but says that the Siemens PLC risks are “one subset of a wider threat landscape”. The agencies are urging all owners and operators of OT (operational technology) systems that use Siemens S7 series and other PLC devices to check that their systems: n are properly protected with all applicable security patches and updates, n are isolated from the Internet wherever possible, and n have strong access controls, and employ security tooling to monitor ICS environments for anomalous or malicious activity. They say that these mitigations are particularly important for owners and operators who work with third-party service providers or systems integrators who may have remote access to their PLCs, because the owners may not realise that their systems are exposed and at risk. For more details see our Web site at www.drivesncontrols.com Cyberattackers are using AI to find vulnerable Siemens S7 PLCs, US warns Siemens S7-1500 PLCs are one of the models identified by the US agencies as being possible targets for cyberattacks
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