What's a good gift for your cobot? Batteries?

Give your collaborative robot a gift card. Take your cobot out for lunch. It's OK. Heavy Metal gives you permission, because January is National Cobot Awareness Month.

Yes, cobots have feelings too, and now we have a whole month to lavish praise upon them!

The idea of a National Cobot Awareness Month comes courtesy of Universal Robots, the large manufacturer of collaborative robots — so named because they can work side by side with humans.

Universal Robots officials claim the company has 60 percent of the global market share of the more than 39,000 cobots sold worldwide. ABI Research says cobots are now the fastest-growing segment of industrial automation, with sales projected to reach $11.8 billion by 2030, up from $1.9 billion in 2018.

That's a lot of boxes of candy and flowers for the female cobots. And if your cobot is a man? How about some aftershave? Or maybe a nice tie? Or just a catered lunch for both?

Heavy Metal says to have some fun during National Cobot Awareness Month. Tear down the safety cage! You don't need one to protect workers from your cobot! They're affordable! Easy to program!

And don't stress, these robots are not out to take your job, but they do want to be your friends. They can handle the mundane factory jobs that humans don't really want to do for eight hours a day, like take injection molded parts off a conveyor and put them in a box. Or place every single part into a trimming fixture, or pass them in front of an inspection camera.

Don't ask a Millennial to do those mind-numbing tasks, ask a cobot!

You know how hard it is to find factory workers? Cobots are ready to go! Just plug them in and they go, 24/7. And of course, they don't take lunch breaks or call in sick (unless the power goes out in the middle of the night).

Universal Robots' press release announcing National Cobot Awareness Week quotes Steve Wittenberg, director of operations at Toolcraft, a machine shop in Seattle. Seattle has 3 percent unemployment. Heck, even the coffee shops are looking at robot baristas, but some tech giant needs to teach them to ask: "Room for Cream?"

Facing a large order, Toolcraft added a third shift. "Nobody wants to run on third shift around here. When you put an ad out, you're not getting very many responses," Wittenberg said. The company bought a Universal Robot, natch!

Heavy Metal gets into a lot of plastics factories and sees a lot of cobots. Ditto for trade shows. You know how factories post numbers on their injection presses: 1, 2, 3 etc.? Well collaborative robots have more personality than that. Don't insult them. At one trade fair, a European automation executive told me that employees at a manufacturer running a bank of cobots decided to have some fun and post names on each one, and wigs on the females. "Hey boss, Mabel is down again," Or "Jane is fraternizing with Steven."

Another thing that's coming are humanoid robots, that walk on two legs and carry things in their arms. An automation company in Oregon called Agility Robotics is selling its Digit robot. Check it out: www.agilityrobotics.com.

Yes it's amazing that Digit can pick up and carry boxes. But is Heavy Metal alone in thinking that these walking robots need a head? The Headless Horseman always scared the crap out of Metal as a child.

Put a head on that thing and Heavy Metal would be proud to take it to Bob Evans restaurant for National Cobot Awareness Month. Robot, you can order anything you want!