A Caersws based firm which provides 'collaborative robots' for use in manufacturing has doubled it's staff during a busy year, it says.

Reeco Automation, which employs eight people at its base in Mid Wales, has secured a number of high-profile customers including Ford, Rolls Royce, Honeywell and, most recently, Unilever.

Reeco provides customers with eight different collaborative robot, or 'cobot' solutions including screw and bolt fixing, pick and place, riveting, dispensing, polishing, electronics and gluing.

By using cobots to carry out a range of tasks, founder and Managing Director Llewelyn Rees says employees can be freed up to work on more important tasks requiring human intervention.

“We are experiencing rapid growth as more and more organisations are appreciating the way in which cobots can complement their human workforce – transforming the way they do things," he said.

"Alongside growth in the UK, we are looking at international expansion and will have a need to recruit the best possible cobot engineering talent as well as people for a range of other roles.”

Reeco was founded in August 2016 by Managing Director Llewelyn Rees and is the leading integrator of cobots in the UK. The global market for cobots is expected to grow by more than 40 per cent per year and be worth over £3billion by 2020.

Before setting up Reeco, Llewelyn spent 15 years working with industrial robots before switching his attention to cobots. Cobots were first launched five years ago and were created specifically to work alongside as co-workers where an industrial robot is not suitable.

Reeco has also formed a successful working relationship with Universal Robots, the world’s leading manufacturer of cobots. In total, over 27,000 Universal cobots are used in several thousand production environments across the globe every day.

“While much of our work has been with large multinationals, we are also partnering with ambitious SMEs which are harnessing increasing automation into their production processes," he said.

“Customers like the fact that we are a full turnkey solutions and safety provider. We have had a year of strong growth and 2019 has begun well.”