On August 27, Teradyne Robotics A/S of Odense, Denmark filed a patent infringement case at the Unified Patent Court’s Local Division in Copenhagen against the German subsidiary of Chinese cobot maker JAKA. Teradyne Robotics owns Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots. The asserted patents cover both software and hardware, sit with Universal Robots A/S, and point at a broad range of JAKA collaborative robot models sold across the EU.
Copenhagen is not a convenience. Teradyne says the infringing acts were committed in Denmark and in numerous other EU member states, which is what puts the case in that division.
Then the sentence that carries the whole filing: a ruling here reaches 17 of the 18 EU member states currently participating in the UPC.
Four months ago the same playbook cleared Hamburg
Teradyne has been to court on this before. In February it took action in Germany against the German subsidiary of a different Chinese cobot maker, Elite Robots, for copyright infringement of Universal Robots software. On April 21 the Regional Court of Hamburg issued a preliminary injunction. Elite Robots Germany was barred with immediate effect from offering or distributing the software or any product containing it in Germany, and ordered to disclose its infringing acts, including which customers it had supplied.
Filing to injunction: about two months.
Two things changed in August. The claim moved from copyright to patents, asserted on hardware as well as software. And the forum moved from one national court to the UPC. The first widens the fight from “you copied our code” to “your machine reads on our claims.” The second widens the map from Germany to most of the single market.
For a Chinese robot company treating Europe as its growth market, the combination is blunt. Losing used to cost you a country. Now it costs you a continent.
The side filing the suit is the side that shrank
Put Universal Robots’ revenue line on the table. $311M in 2021, up 41%. A $326M peak in 2022. $304M in 2023. $293M in 2024. Teradyne stopped breaking out UR and MiR separately in 2025 and now reports robotics at the segment level; backing into the first three quarters puts UR somewhere near $240M-$250M for the year.
The company that invented the category and has sold more than 100,000 arms is down roughly a quarter from its peak. In 2025 Teradyne Robotics cut about 25% of its workforce across two rounds and folded UR and MiR sales, marketing and service under one leadership line.
That is the context this lawsuit comes from. The patent offensive is not being launched from strength. It is being launched from three years of declining revenue and two rounds of layoffs.
Teradyne Robotics president Jean-Pierre Hathout was direct about it back in March, saying the company was taking a stand against “any competitors willing to copy proprietary hardware or software design to undercut on price.” The same statement called on European policymakers to treat unchecked infringement as a subsidy paid by European industry to non-European rivals. Germany’s VDMA has separately warned that the country is losing ground in the global robotics race, low-cost Asian competition among the reasons.
Cheap arms decide which station gets automated
The pace of European factory automation has never been set by what robots can do. It is set by what an arm costs.
The large automotive plants automated years ago. The remaining volume sits with small and mid-size manufacturers, and there the decision is arithmetic: purchase price plus integration, weighed against two to three years of an operator’s fully loaded cost for one machine-tending, screwdriving, labeling or inspection station. Chinese vendors took European share by moving that break-even. Same payload, same repeatability, one price tier down, payback compressed from three years to eighteen months.
So the real stake is not in a Danish courtroom. It is in the European stations that have not been automated yet. An injunction covering 17 countries does not only raise JAKA’s cost. It thins the supply of low- and mid-priced collaborative arms across the EU.
North American order data shows where that demand now lives: non-automotive buyers took 56% of robot orders in Q2, increasingly warehousing, food and metal fabrication, all of them sensitive to per-unit price. Europe’s mix looks similar. And Chinese vendors are arriving at scale, with Unitree putting its European push on the record in July.
For workers, this is not a reprieve
It is tempting to read a ruling like this as protection for European factory jobs. Fewer affordable robots bought, people kept on a while longer.
That reading fails on two counts.
First, what gets delayed is not automation. It is local automation. A European mid-size manufacturer that cannot make the numbers work on a station does not go back to hiring. It outsources the process step, or declines to add the line in Europe at all. The station does not turn back into a good job because the arm got expensive. It disappears into somebody else’s plant. The Humanoid-Schaeffler deal in May was the other end of the same variable: where the capacity lands is where the jobs land.
Second, the people who have already lost work over this fight are on the plaintiff’s side. Teradyne Robotics cut roughly a quarter of its own staff in 2025. The company selling labor substitution went through it first. It is simultaneously building a 67,000-sq-ft operations hub in Wixom, Michigan, opening in 2026 and projected to create more than 200 jobs, sited near automotive customers. That is not net creation either. It is relocation, Denmark to metro Detroit.
On timing, Hamburg ran two months from action to preliminary injunction, but the UPC case is a main action rather than a provisional measure and will not move on that clock. Two things are worth watching. Whether EU plants already running JAKA arms start getting supply and service risk notices from their distributors. And whether Teradyne pushes this up a level again, as it did in March, from company-versus-company litigation into an EU market-access question for non-European robot makers. If the second one happens, the reach goes well past one defendant.
Sources
- Teradyne Robotics files patent infringement case against JAKA in Europe (Robotics & Automation News, August 27, 2026)
- German court rules in favor of Teradyne Robotics and issues preliminary injunction against Elite Robots Deutschland (Universal Robots, April 21, 2026)
- Teradyne Robotics sues Chinese cobot maker over UR software (The Robot Report, March 10, 2026)
