Teradyne and Elite Robots Settle on Confidential Terms, Five Months After a German Injunction on UR Software

Teradyne Robotics and Elite Robots ended their copyright fight on October 1 without a published term, a number or an admission, leaving the one concrete result of the case, a German injunction, as the only evidence of what the dispute was worth.

The settlement was announced on Universal Robots' news page. Jette Withers, chief legal officer of Teradyne Robotics, said "The parties have resolved their pending legal dispute by mutual agreement." Terms are confidential, and Withers said the settlement is not an admission by Elite Robots of liability, infringement or the validity of any intellectual property right.

What the case was about

Universal Robots A/S is a Teradyne unit and the company that sells the UR collaborative arms. Teradyne Robotics A/S accused Elite Robots, a Shanghai maker, of copying UR's proprietary software. New Equipment Digest names the software as PolyScope 5, the platform through which "tens of thousands" of UR cobots are programmed and operated.

On April 21, as Hannover Messe opened, the Regional Court of Hamburg granted a preliminary injunction against Elite Robots Deutschland GmbH, The Robot Report reported. The subsidiary had to stop offering or distributing the software, and any product containing it, in Germany, and to disclose the customers it had supplied. New Equipment Digest adds that Elite took its booth down at the fair.

The order of events

Date	Event	Source
Early 2026	Cease-and-desist letter, then a copyright suit	Robot Report, New Equipment Digest
April 21	Hamburg court issues a preliminary injunction, Germany only	Robot Report
October 1	Settlement announced, terms confidential	Universal Robots

The two April accounts disagree on when the suit began. The Robot Report says Teradyne started proceedings the previous month; New Equipment Digest says February 2026. Neither names the court case number, and the October release gives no claims at all.

Two sides of a cobot price war

The commercial stakes show in the companies' own descriptions. Elite Robots says it has deployed more than 10,000 cobots in more than 35 countries, holds more than 200 patents and IP assets, and ranks among the top three cobot brands in China, according to New Equipment Digest. It has a U.S. office in Knoxville, Tennessee. Those are Elite's claims; no independent count appears in either article.

Teradyne is the incumbent under pressure. The Robot Report, citing the Danish paper Børsen, says Teradyne Robotics lost 15.5% of its revenue in 2025 on turnover of about DKK 2 billion, roughly $310 million. It also cites the International Federation of Robotics: more than half of the robots installed in 2024 went into China.

Jean-Pierre Hathout, president of the Teradyne Robotics Group, said in April: "we have chosen to take a stand against any competitors copying our proprietary hardware or software design". David Brandt, vice president of R&D and chief technology officer at Universal Robots, put it more bluntly: "this is about stealing technology".

What the injunction covered, and what it did not

The Hamburg order applied only to Germany, took effect immediately and was preliminary; New Equipment Digest says no court date had been set for a full hearing. Teradyne said it would pursue distributors and partners in Germany that kept offering the software, and that it "continually evaluates" steps in other jurisdictions without speculating on them.

Elite Robots made no public statement on the lawsuit, according to New Equipment Digest, and the Robot Report's request for comment had gone unanswered at publication. The only public words from either side since are Teradyne's, in the October 1 release. That makes the settlement a one-sided record: the sentence that the deal is not an admission is Jette Withers' own, from Teradyne's side.

Why the software layer is the fight

A six-axis cobot arm is built from the same few parts everywhere: harmonic gearboxes, brushless joints, encoders and a controller. The part a customer cannot easily swap is the programming environment, because integrators train on it and fixtures, grippers and scripts are written against it. That is my reading, not Teradyne's, but it matches the target of the suit: the injunction names the software, and the products only because they contain it.

Teradyne has also raised a second argument. The Robot Report says it alleges Elite's software included a setting that let users disable safety features, and New Equipment Digest says Teradyne has told European authorities that Elite's arms may not meet the standards for human-robot collaboration. These are Teradyne's claims, and neither article reports a finding on them.

The settlement does not resolve that safety allegation in public. It also does not say whether the German injunction, which was preliminary and not a final judgment, has been lifted, or whether Elite changed its software. A separate fight over Chinese robot hardware is under way in Washington; the FCC's foreign robot ban divided the 14 MassRobotics members surveyed six, six and two, which shows how little consensus exists on the question.

What would change my read

Teradyne has other bets on factory automation, among them the Bright Machines investment we covered earlier, which gives it reason to defend the software layer that ties its own arms to integrators.

The variable to watch is Elite's German price list. A return of its cobot arms to German distributors without a new software stack would mean the case ended in a licence; continued absence, or a different programming environment on its next arm, would mean a retreat. Teradyne's next quarterly report may also show whether the fight helped Universal Robots' revenue.