Cobot Warranties Compared: What Six Brands Actually Cover in 2026

Cobot buyers compare payload, reach, repeatability and price. Almost nobody compares warranties before signing, partly because the terms are hard to find — they live in service manuals and purchase-terms pages, not on product pages.

So I went and read them. Six brands, primary documents only: the manufacturer's own manual, service policy or purchase terms. What comes back is more interesting than "everyone gives a year."

The table

Three observations from that table are worth more than the individual rows.

1. Universal Robots and Dobot use the same clause

UR's manual caps its warranty at "a maximum of 15 months from shipment." Dobot's after-sales policy says "12 months of entry into service (maximum of 15 months from shipment)." Same structure, same two numbers, one a Danish market leader and one a Chinese challenger.

This is not a coincidence and it is not copying so much as convergence on an industry-standard supply clause — the three-month buffer exists because machines sit in crates between shipment and commissioning. It is a useful thing to know because it sets the market baseline: if a vendor offers you materially less than 12 months in service, they are below the norm, and if they offer materially more, that is a genuine differentiator worth pricing.

2. The clock starts in three different places, and it matters

This is the part that actually costs buyers money. Three start points appear across six brands:

• From shipment (UR, Dobot) — the clock runs while the crate is on a boat and while the machine sits in your receiving area. The 15-month cap means a robot that takes three months to reach commissioning has burned its entire buffer.
• From delivery (Standard Bots) — better for the buyer; ocean freight no longer eats coverage.
• From installation (Doosan, per its manual) — best for the buyer, because coverage tracks actual use.

On a project where the robot arrives before the cell is ready — which is most projects — the difference between shipment-start and installation-start can be a quarter of the coverage period. If you are integrating a UR or Dobot arm into a cell that will not be commissioned for months, that is worth raising in negotiation before the PO, not after a fault.

One caveat on Doosan, flagged rather than smoothed over: the official manual states the period runs from the date the robot was installed, but a Doosan-authored service manual circulating through distributor channels says "1 year after purchase." Two documents from the same manufacturer, two different start points. If you are buying Doosan, get the applicable start date named in the purchase agreement rather than relying on either manual.

3. The headline reliability number is usually not the warranty

FANUC markets the CRX line on "8 years of ZERO maintenance" covering motors, reducers, cables, sensors and grease, and backs the claim with accelerated life testing. It is a real engineering claim and, if it holds, a genuine operating-cost advantage.

It is also not a warranty. FANUC's CRX reliability page does not state a warranty period at all. "No scheduled maintenance for eight years" and "we will fix it free for eight years" are entirely different commitments, and the first is being read as the second across a lot of the industry.

igus does something comparable from the other direction: the ReBeL — listed at $7,499 with 2 kg payload and 600 mm reach — is sold on a movement-cycle durability claim rather than a published time-based warranty. For a low-duty-cycle application, a cycle guarantee may genuinely be worth more than 12 months of calendar coverage. For a two-shift operation, it may be worth much less. The point is that it is a different unit of measurement, and you cannot compare it to "one year" without knowing your own duty cycle.

What's excluded — and the clause almost nobody reads

Exclusions are boringly consistent across the brands that publish them: user fault, accident, abuse, unauthorised repair or modification, use outside specification, and consumables. Standard Bots names "normal depletion of consumable parts such as batteries" explicitly. Dobot voids coverage for damage from "natural disasters, including fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, lightning, high winds, and floods." None of this should surprise anyone.

Two things in the fine print are less boring:

Dobot commits to a shipping SLA. If a warranty claim is approved, replacement items ship "within seven workdays at no cost." That is one of the few hard response commitments any of these vendors puts in a public document, and for a single-robot shop where the cobot *is* the production line, a named turnaround is worth more than an extra three months of coverage.

Standard Bots reserves the right to change support fees on 15 days' notice. Its purchase terms put hardware and software support on an auto-renewing subscription, with fees amendable on no less than fifteen days' prior notice. Its warranty on leased equipment and add-on software also runs only for as long as you keep subscribing. This is the structural thing to watch as more cobots ship with software subscriptions attached: your coverage can become contingent on a recurring payment whose price the vendor can move. Worth reading closely, and worth a fixed-price clause if the machine is critical.

Doosan adds a transferability provision that is unusually buyer-friendly: the warranty can transfer to a second owner in a private sale, provided the manufacturer is notified and the period has not expired. If you buy used or refurbished, that clause is worth checking for on every brand.

How to use this when you're buying

Five questions, in order of how much money they move:

1. What date starts the warranty — shipment, delivery, or installation? Get it in the PO.
2. Is there a response or replacement-shipping commitment, and is it in writing? Dobot's seven workdays is the benchmark to hold others to.
3. Is the reliability claim in the brochure the same as the warranty term? With FANUC's CRX, it is not.
4. Does any part of my coverage depend on an ongoing subscription, and can that price change? With Standard Bots, it can, on 15 days' notice.
5. Is the warranty transferable? Matters at resale, and matters if you are buying second-hand.

None of these changes which arm is right for your application — that is still a payload, reach and cycle-time decision, and our payload-class price curve is the better starting point for that. But warranty terms are one of the few remaining places where two arms with near-identical specs differ in ways that show up in your budget two years later, and they are decided at PO time, when you still have leverage.

For context on what the rest of that budget looks like once the arm is on site, see our line-by-line five-year TCO model — where service and spares are a bigger share of the total than the hardware.

Limitations

This compares published, publicly reachable terms as of 29 July 2026. Negotiated terms in a real purchase agreement can and often do differ, and regional distributors sometimes extend coverage on their own account — JAKA arms, for example, are advertised with a two-year warranty by at least one US distributor, which we have not been able to confirm against a JAKA-published document and have therefore left out of the table. FANUC and igus warranty terms exist; they are simply not published where a buyer can read them before a sales conversation, which is itself the finding.

Sources

• Universal Robots UR10 user manual — product warranty section (maximum 15 months from shipment)
• Universal Robots — Service360 service contract tiers
• Dobot — industrial robot after-sales service policy (12 months in service / max 15 from shipment; 7-workday replacement)
• Standard Bots — purchase terms (12-month warranty period from delivery; support fee amendment on 15 days' notice)
• Doosan Robotics — product warranty and responsibility, M/H series manual (1 year from installation)
• Doosan Robotics SVM service manual (states "1 year after purchase")
• FANUC America — CRX reliability page ("8 years of ZERO maintenance", no warranty term stated)
• igus — ReBeL cobot product page ($7,499, 2 kg payload, 600 mm reach)