IKO (Nippon Thompson)

IKO is a brand of Nippon Thompson, a Tokyo-based Japanese maker of bearings and guideways. It does not build robots, but it supplies the mechanics that robots turn and slide on. The company catalogues we hold are dominated by three families: crossed roller bearings (the CRBH, CRBC, CRB, CRBT, CRBS and CRBF series), Linear Way and Linear Roller Way guideways, and Cam Follower and Roller Follower guide rollers. Needle roller bearings and a mechatronics line complete the range.

The first family matters most for robotics. A crossed roller bearing has cylindrical rollers placed alternately at right angles between the inner and outer rings. Because the contact is along a line, elastic deformation under load is very small, and a single bearing takes radial and thrust forces and moments at the same time. The manufacturer states plainly that these bearings are used in the rotating parts of industrial robots, machine tools and medical equipment, where compactness, rigidity and rotational accuracy count. The catalogue distinguishes a high-rigidity type, a standard type, super-slim and slim types, and a variant with mounting holes.

In practice this is the part that sits at the output of a gearbox in a joint. You put it where the gearbox alone could not cope with the tilting moment. That is why, in the discussion of “Actuators in Humanoid Robots”, the bearing matters as much as Harmonic Drive or Nabtesco: both gear types need a stiff support for the output. Linear guideways and Cam Followers, by contrast, appear in linear axes, feeders and workstations rather than in arms.

We have no documented case in which IKO is a named supplier of a specific robot in our catalogue, so we will not point to a model that certainly contains it. The catalogues speak of applications in industrial robots and precision equipment. Makers of arms such as FANUC, Yaskawa Electric or Kawasaki Heavy Industries usually do not disclose their bearing suppliers, and in cobots and humanoid robots the decision is made in the joint design.

For the price and performance of a whole robot, bearings matter indirectly but really. Bearing stiffness decides how much play and deflection an arm shows under load, and so whether the repeatability quoted on the datasheet holds at full payload. A bearing with higher capacity is heavier and dearer, which on a humanoid eats into payload and runtime. How to read such figures is explained in “How to Read a Robot Datasheet”, and what the whole machine costs in “How Much Does a Humanoid Robot Cost in 2026”.

For Poland and Europe, the materials point to Nippon Thompson Europe sales offices, headquartered in Rotterdam, with branches in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and France. We found no Polish office in the catalogues, so an integrator's enquiry is simplest to send to the German office or to a local bearing distributor, whose details the manufacturer does not give. For designers of their own joints, as in laboratories or schools, it is a sensible starting point, though technical advice will be in English. Alternatives include igus with polymer bearings and Spinea with cycloidal gears.