ABB's GoFa Cobot Steals the Show Floor, One Careful Reach at a Time
A visitor leans in close as an ABB GoFa collaborative robot arcs overhead against a magenta-lit booth backdrop, its wrist-mounted status light glowing a calm green — the signal that the arm is mid-cycle and safe to be near. A second GoFa works just behind him, and the FlexPendant control unit sits front and center on the booth counter, ABB's red logo unmistakable against the white housing.
The GoFa line is ABB's answer to a factory floor that increasingly wants robots working with people rather than behind fencing. The GoFa family spans roughly 0.95 to 1.52 meters of reach and 5 to 12 kilograms of payload, all IP67-rated against dust and moisture, and built around an OmniCore controller paired with the FlexPendant interface shown in this shot. The whole pitch of the "collaborative" label is visible in the photo itself: no cage, no barrier, just a person standing within arm's length of an active industrial robot.
That proximity isn't a marketing stunt — it's engineered. Torque and positioning sensors built into each of the six joints give the arm power and force limiting, meaning it's designed to stop immediately if it senses unexpected contact with a person, and the status light on the wrist communicates the robot's state — white for standby, green for running, yellow for programming, red for stopped. That green glow near the gripper in the image lines up exactly with that scheme — this cobot is live and cycling.
Booths like this one have become the standard way ABB gets the "safe to stand next to" message across, since a spec sheet can't really convey it. The company has been busy validating that pitch beyond factory automation, too — at SLAS 2026 in Boston, ABB ran GoFa cobots through lab bench workflows including pipetting, titration, and GC sample prep alongside instruments from Agilent and Mettler Toledo, framing the arm as a general-purpose mover that can slot into any vendor's lab ecosystem. Whether it's a trade show floor or a lab bench, the demo is the same: put a person right next to the arm and let the safety systems do the talking.