Universal Robots bought one of JAKA's cobot arms and took a hard look at how it was built. On August 24 its parent, Teradyne Robotics, filed patent infringement proceedings against JAKA's German subsidiary at the Unified Patent Court in Copenhagen, naming three Universal Robots patents. All three were filed on March 2, 2007. All three expire on March 2, 2027.
Twenty years of exclusivity run out in under six months. Whatever the court decides about JAKA, that is the date Teradyne has to be ready for.
What the docket says
The case is UPC-CFI-0003057/2026, filed in the Copenhagen Local Division and announced publicly three days later. One patent covers a programmable robot and its touchscreen interface. The other two cover joint construction, including a safety brake built from a solenoid, a ratchet and an annular friction member. All three carry a March 2006 priority date and are assigned to Universal Robots. The docket holds 128 documents and none of them are public yet.
JAKA says it was never served. In a September 3 statement the company said its legal advisers had confirmed that no proceedings were open against it as of September 2. It pointed to two earlier freedom-to-operate analyses that it says found no infringement of Universal Robots patents, and it moved for injunctive relief to stop what it calls false and damaging public statements. JAKA also says it holds more than 300 patents of its own. The Robot Report notes the gap between filing and serving could explain the discrepancy. Nothing has been decided.
Twenty years, ending in March
The calendar is the one part of this case already settled. Universal Robots filed all three applications on March 2, 2007, claiming priority to March 2006. Google Patents lists the anticipated expiration for each one as March 2, 2027, and all three are still active. EP3530420, one of the two joint patents, was not granted until September 2023, which left it about three and a half years of enforceable life from grant to expiry.
David Brandt, the chief technology officer at Universal Robots, put the underlying problem plainly when the case was announced. "You have to build the robot and ship it to a customer to have a robot," he told The Robot Report. "And, of course, some competitor can buy the robot, take it apart, and look at how we design stuff." A patent stops a competitor from selling in Europe, and leaves untouched everything that competitor learns from a machine already in the field.
iRobot let its patent term run out without building much behind it. Exclusivity kept rival brands off the shelf for years, and all the while the factory assembling the product was learning everything about it. In December 2025 iRobot filed for Chapter 11, and the company that ended up with the equity was Shenzhen Picea Robotics, its own primary contract manufacturer.
What JAKA still has to get past
Universal Robots says it has sold more than 100,000 cobots, and it has spent more than a decade building software, accessories and an integrator base around the arms. Teradyne Robotics reported $100 million in the second quarter of 2026, its fifth consecutive quarter of growth and 33% above the same quarter a year earlier. Most of that came from Universal Robots.
None of that expires in March. A cheaper arm with comparable joints still has to displace a machine the customer's integrator already knows how to program, and that kind of switching cost compounds while a patent term counts down. No examiner puts a term limit on that work, and it is what Teradyne will still have on March 3. That is why I read the lawsuit as housekeeping.
Universal Robots spent its twenty years building an integrator base. The University of Nebraska Medical Center tech transfer program I worked on years ago spent its patent life waiting. We built a navigated sagittal saw for knee replacement, and I managed the patents that came out of it. The novel claim was about cutting planes, a real distinction from the burr-based platforms most of the field was building, and we won that argument at the patent office. Then the company stopped pushing the product. Stryker's Mako RPS now ships a navigated handheld saw that does the job better than ours ever did.
Teradyne has something the Nebraska program never had, and Brandt names it without quite calling it an advantage. He worries aloud that unsafe copies could hurt somebody and sour regulators on the entire cobot category, which is a category Universal Robots helped create. A safety record takes years to build, cannot be reverse engineered off a bench, and carries no term limit either.
Dave's take
A patent is a clock, not a moat. March 2, 2027 has been readable on these three filings since the day each one was granted. What I want to know from any founder holding a portfolio like that is which advantage is still standing on March 3, and who spent the twenty years building it.
From Dave’s video library
A related argument in video form. I read Anthropic's own founder playbook and show where its fine print undercuts the headline claim that AI removed the hard part.
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Dave Saunders is the founder of Base Reality Group and a Fractional CPO for product companies. He was a founder and operator at Galen Robotics, where the surgical-robotics platform earned FDA De Novo authorization in 2023, and he managed a 35-patent portfolio licensed from Johns Hopkins. He wrote Founders Who Finish and publishes The Build. More about Dave →