Technical and System Requirements for Industrial Robot-as-a-Service (IRaaS)

Industrial Robot as a Service (IRaaS) is a new business model that enables SMEs to quickly adapt to changing production demands. The IRaaS model introduces industrial robots that can be rented and used on demand, requiring little to no programming knowledge. With this shift from capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operational expenditures (OPEX), the cost of ownership and expertise barriers are eliminated, allowing SMEs to avoid large upfront costs and providing greater flexibility. In this paper, the requirements for developing and realizing these new IRaaS services are identified. The functional requirements are identified by first eliciting the non-functional requirements and proposing robotic concepts that can be servitized. The requirements are also mapped into IRaaS concepts and converged to the underlying challenges.