TL;DR

• There is no single price, and a quotation without parameters attached cannot be compared. Take out robot cost is set by payload class, reach envelope, repeatability class, servo platform, and EOAT integration — five variables that move independently.
• Machine tonnage maps to stroke model through a fixed table. The published SPRE series covers 90–200 ton machines with the 700 I model, 160–320 ton with the 900 I, and 250–470 ton with the 1100 I, all rated at 6 kg maximum load including the gripper.
• Payload ratings include the end-of-arm tooling. A 6 kg rating is not 6 kg of part. On a light-part line the gripper is frequently the heaviest item, and sizing from part weight alone means oversizing the robot.
• Published minimum take-out times run 1.7 to 2.1 seconds across the series. That figure is the mechanical motion from mould open to part clear — it excludes injection, cooling, and dwell, so it is never a production cycle time.
• Send the part profile and cycle target, not a model number. Quoting from a catalogue model returns catalogue pricing built on catalogue assumptions, which is how buyers end up paying for capacity they never use.

The honest answer to what a take out robot costs is that it cannot be answered with a number, and any supplier who gives you one without asking about your part is either quoting a standard configuration or guessing. The cost is assembled from five variables that move independently of each other: payload class, reach envelope, repeatability class, servo platform, and end-of-arm tooling integration. Change any one of them and the price moves, sometimes significantly, without any other variable changing.

What can be given precisely is the specification envelope against which a quotation should be read. Our published SPRE take out robot series — a single-stage design rated for injection molding machines from 90 to 470 tons — states a maximum load of 6 kg including the gripper, AC servo drives on all three axes, working air pressure of 5 to 7 kgf/cm², and minimum take-out times of 1.7 to 2.1 seconds depending on model and axis count.

That envelope is the reference this article is built on. When a quotation arrives, the useful first step is not to read the price but to check which stroke model, axis count, and payload assumption produced it — because most quotations that land outside an expected band do so because of a specification mismatch rather than because the supplier is charging unusually.

The Published Specification Reference

Before discussing cost drivers, it is worth establishing what a real specification envelope looks like. The following is the published data for the SPRE single-stage take out robot series, and it is the reference against which the rest of this article discusses price positioning.

Three things in this table drive the entire cost conversation, and they are worth reading carefully before moving on.

First, payload does not scale with machine size across this series. All three models carry the same 6 kg maximum load rating. What scales with machine tonnage is stroke — a 470-ton machine needs a 1100 mm vertical stroke because the mould itself is taller, not because the part is heavier. Buyers who assume a bigger machine implies a higher payload specification are sourcing the wrong robot for their part, and paying a higher price band for reach capacity they do not need.

Second, the take-out time increases with stroke. The published minimum take-out time moves from 1.7 seconds on the 700 I model to 2.1 seconds on the 1100 I. That is a 24% increase, and it is entirely explained by the distance the vertical axis has to travel. A buyer whose cycle-time target is tight needs to know this before choosing the stroke model, because choosing the larger model for reach capacity quietly costs cycle time.

Third, the 5-axis variant is a different machine, not a feature. The five-axis double-arm configuration has its own vertical and crosswise stroke figures, its own air consumption at 1.5 NL per cycle against 1.0 for the three-axis, and its own net weight at 250 kg against 228 kg on the 700 I model. The take-out time advantage comes from the second arm not having to return empty before the next pick. That is why the axis count appears as a line item in the price rather than as a toggle.

How Machine Tonnage Maps to Stroke Model

The mapping is fixed and published, and it is where I would start with any buyer who is surprised by a price.

The 700 I model covers 90 to 200 tons. The 900 I covers 160 to 320 tons. The 1100 I covers 250 to 470 tons. These bands overlap deliberately, because a machine may sit at either end depending on how much open stroke it actually delivers.

The mistake I see most often is a machine sitting near a band boundary being mapped upward unnecessarily. A 200-ton machine at the low open-stroke end of its specification may only need the 700 I model, but a buyer who specifies by tonnage alone will land on the 900 I. That decision adds 20 mm of vertical stroke, roughly 150 mm of crosswise stroke, 180 mm of transverse stroke, and about 20 kg of net weight — and puts the quotation into a higher price band for reach the application does not require.

The fix is unglamorous and takes five minutes. Measure the actual open stroke of the mould, add the part height, add the gripper clearance, and compare the result against the published vertical stroke for each model. That calculation usually collapses three candidate models down to one.

Price Driver 1: Payload Class and the Gripper Problem

Payload is the variable buyers name most often and specify least carefully. The published specification column reads ‘maximum load including gripper’, and that wording does more work than it appears to.

On a light-part line, the gripper is frequently heavier than the part. A bottle preform, a thin-wall container, a small connector housing — these can weigh tens of grams while a vacuum-cup gripper assembly weighs hundreds. A buyer who calculates required capacity from part weight alone and then discovers the gripper during EOAT design has specified a robot with insufficient payload, and the correction requires either a heavier wrist class or a different EOAT approach entirely.

The cost chain runs upward from there. Higher payload requires a stronger actuator class, which requires a larger structural mass, which requires a larger base and stronger castings. Each of those steps moves the quotation into a higher band. So the practical answer to ‘how much does payload affect price’ is: it affects price a great deal, but only indirectly, and only through the chain that starts with the gripper rather than the part.

Why the series holds payload flat across stroke models

Looking again at the published table, the 6 kg rating is identical across the 700 I, 900 I, and 1100 I models. This is not an oversight; it reflects how injection molding applications actually distribute.

Part weight correlates with clamping force far more weakly than most buyers expect. A 450-ton machine can run a lightweight thin-wall part or a heavier part in a smaller cavity; a 120-ton machine can run either. What determines the robot requirement is the mould geometry, which correlates strongly with tonnage, and the part weight, which correlates weakly.

The practical consequence is that stroke and payload are separate decisions. Stroke follows the mould. Payload follows the part plus the gripper. Sourcing a robot that moves the correct stroke with the correct payload means treating them as two independent questions, and that separation is what keeps a buyer inside the expected price band.

Price Driver 2: Reach Envelope

Reach is where structural mass and therefore price actually accumulate. The reach has to cover the full mould open-and-close stroke, the part removal path, and the downstream placement station, and every additional millimetre of envelope adds to the structure that has to move.

Three published variables determine the envelope. The vertical stroke has to exceed the maximum mould-open stroke plus part height plus gripper clearance. The horizontal traverse has to cover the mould face, the placement station, and the conveyor. And on tall or deep-cavity parts, a telescopic extension reaches deeper into the cavity without enlarging the floor footprint — which matters in a shop where machine spacing is already fixed.

The published series addresses this with three stroke models rather than a single adjustable arm, and the tradeoff is visible in the table. The 700 I model reaches 680 mm vertically on the three-axis configuration; the 1100 I reaches 1080 mm. If your mould only needs 700 mm, the larger model buys you nothing and costs you cycle time, weight, and price band simultaneously.

Price Driver 3: Repeatability and Positioning Class

Repeatability determines whether the robot produces the part you specified, and it is one of the clearer cases where over-specifying is a direct waste of money.

Industrial robot position repeatability typically sits in the range of plus or minus 0.05 mm to plus or minus 0.3 mm across categories. A sprue picker working on a tolerance-tolerant part runs comfortably at the plus or minus 0.3 mm end. A robot doing in-mold label placement or insert loading runs at the plus or minus 0.05 mm end. Specifying the tight end for a tolerant part moves the quotation into a higher band without changing the finished part in any way.

Two qualifications matter here. Path repeatability is a different question from position repeatability, and it matters for EOAT work where the arm passes through a defined spatial corridor — an insert-loading cycle can meet position repeatability and still miss the part fixture. And the rated figure is a static specification; under full payload at full speed the envelope typically widens, so a buyer who specs statically and runs at full load will see wider actual repeatability than the sheet suggests.

Price Driver 4: Servo Platform and Controller Architecture

The servo platform sets the cycle-time envelope and the response time to machine commands, and it is not a small component of the price.

Three published variables determine it. Servo motor class dominates cycle time, with motor power rating and encoder resolution as the primary drivers — a high-power servo with a high-resolution encoder is required for label placement, while simple sprue removal runs on far lower power. Controller processing capability determines whether the controller can run the motion profile, the I/O sequencing, and the safety logic for complex work. And the network protocol has to match the injection molding machine controller; a mismatch requires a gateway card that adds latency and an extra integration surface.

The published series states its drive system as AC servo motors on X, Y and Z, and its power supply as AC220V ±10%, 12 A, 50/60 Hz single phase. Those figures are worth checking against the machine in front of you before anything else, because a supply mismatch at the installation stage is an expensive problem discovered late.

Price Driver 5: EOAT Integration and Changeover

The end-of-arm tooling interface determines whether one robot can run your whole part portfolio, and it is the variable most likely to move a quotation upward when a shop grows.

Three published variables matter. The robot wrist has a mechanical mounting pattern that has to match your EOAT, and a non-standard pattern means paying for custom tooling on every part profile change. The wrist has integrated vacuum and pneumatic channels whose count and capacity have to match the pickup mechanism, where under-specification produces dropped parts and over-specification produces cost without benefit. And quick-change EOAT systems allow swapping the gripper between part profiles in minutes rather than hours, which is a capability that belongs to the upper portion of the band by design.

The decision rule is straightforward. A shop running one part profile should leave quick-change out of the specification entirely, because it will never amortise. A shop running multiple profiles should include it from the start, because retrofitting it later means re-quoting the entire wrist.

Matching Robot Type to Your Production Profile

Payload and stroke tell you where a robot sits in the specification envelope. They do not tell you which robot you need. That decision comes from the part profile, the cycle-time target, and the EOAT complexity, and it is the decision I would make before discussing price with any supplier.

Two observations from this matrix are worth stating explicitly, because both are places buyers regularly overspend.

The first is that a shop running simple pick-and-place work pays the five-axis premium without using the additional axis. The second degree of freedom exists to shorten the pick cycle and to reach into awkward geometries. If your part profile does not need either, the premium is cost without benefit, and the three-axis configuration at the lower-to-middle band delivers the same finished part.

The second is the opposite case, and it is more common than I would like. A shop running thin-wall packaging at a 9-second target on a three-axis configuration spends its margin waiting. The cycle-time gap between a three-axis and a five-axis configuration is not marginal on a fast cycle, because the robot motion is a larger fraction of the total cycle. This is where the lifecycle cost argument in the next section becomes decisive.

Why the Purchase Price Is the Least Important Number

Two robots quoted at similar prices can differ meaningfully in cost over a five-year program, and the difference does not appear on either invoice. It appears in uptime, in cycle-time compliance, and in how many operators the cell still needs.

The mechanism is straightforward. A robot that narrowly misses your cycle target does not usually fail visibly — it forces the cell to run at a rate you did not plan for, which usually means either a second machine or an operator covering the gap. That cost sits in your labour line, not in your capital line, which is precisely why it is easy to miss when comparing two quotations.

The second mechanism is uptime. Published take-out time is a mechanical figure measured from mould open to part clear. It excludes injection, cooling, and mould dwell, so it is bounded in practice by whichever of those phases is longest. This means a faster robot cannot make a cooling-dominated cycle faster, but it also means a slow robot on a fast-dominated cycle is pure loss — the cycle is waiting on the robot and nothing else can recover it.

This is why I would ask for a quotation built from your part profile rather than from a model number. A part profile, a mould open stroke, a placement geometry, and a cycle target produce a quotation that reflects the application. A model number produces a quotation that reflects a catalogue assumption, and catalogue assumptions are frequently wrong in the expensive direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What to Send When You Request Pricing

The single most effective thing a buyer can do to get a usable quotation is to stop sending model numbers. The information that produces an accurate quotation is short, and it is not confidential.

Send the mould open stroke in millimetres. Send the part weight and, if there is a runner, the runner weight. Send the placement station geometry — where the part goes and where the conveyor sits. Send the cycle-time target in seconds. Send the machine tonnage and the fieldbus the machine controller speaks. If the part has a specific tolerance, send that too, because it determines whether you need the tight or the relaxed end of the repeatability range.

That is six items. With them, a supplier can quote against the actual application. Without them, a supplier can only quote against a catalogue assumption, and both parties will know the quotation is provisional.

Where I Would Push Back on My Own Advice

I hold a strong position that specification discipline beats price negotiation, and I should be honest about where a reasonable buyer might disagree with me.

The strongest argument against my position is on small shops. If you are running a single machine, a single part, and modest volume, the analysis above is more machinery than the decision deserves. In that case, taking the standard recommended configuration for your machine tonnage and your part weight is a perfectly defensible decision, and the effort of a full specification exercise may exceed the value it returns. I would still encourage measuring the mould open stroke, because that one step costs five minutes and prevents the most expensive single error.

There is also a second place where I might be too rigid. I argue for specifying reach against actual geometry rather than catalogue maximum, and that is usually right. But in a shop where machine spacing is fixed and the placement station cannot easily be moved, over-specifying reach slightly to buy installation flexibility is a reasonable trade I would not argue against. The rule I would not bend is on repeatability and quick-change EOAT, because those two genuinely do not transfer between applications.

Request Factory Pricing for Your Application

If you want a quotation built around your part rather than around a catalogue, the take-out robot series page documents the published specification envelope, and the 3-axis and 5-axis servo robot arms page carries the full model table with stroke, load, air consumption, and net weight for each published configuration.

For the wider range including in-mold labeling robots, CNC robots, high-speed robots, open-type robots, and telescopic configurations, the robot arm product category page lists the full lineup.

Send the six specification items above and you will get a quotation you can actually compare against another supplier’s. You can reach us through the contact page, by phone at +86-574-22709760, on Skype at 8613456156992, or by email to sales19@nbrobot.com. Standard payment terms published across the series are T/T, L/C, PayPal, and Western Union.

• Phone: +86-574-22709760
• Skype: 8613456156992
• Email: sales19@nbrobot.com
• Address: No. 2 Oufu Road, Taishang Industrial Park, Yuyao, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China