Universal Robots, the Danish collaborative robot (cobot) company, is presenting at the beginning of this year UR AI Accelerator, a fully functional hardware and software toolkit designed to facilitate the creation of AI-powered cobot applications.
Created for research and commercial applications designed for research and commercial applications, the UR AI robots provide developers with an extensible platform on which to create applications, speed up research and cut down the time to market for AI products.
The toolkit adds AI enhancement into Universal Robots’ (UR) next-generation software platform, PolyScope X. It runs on Nvidia Isaac accelerated libraries and AI models running in an Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin system-on-module.
In particular, the Nvidia Isaac Manipulator gives developers the capability to add enhanced performance and the latest AI technology to their robotics applications. The toolkit includes the latest, high-quality Orbbec Gemini 335Lg 3D camera.
All of it is seamlessly integrated; this toolkit gives developers the complete architecture for go-to-market and is available immediately out of the box.
Through built-in demo programs Through in-built demo programs, the AI Accelerator leverages UR’s platform to provide features such as tracking, pose estimation of objects and image classification, path planning, as well as state detection, quality inspection, and more.
Facilitated by PolyScope X, the UR AI Accelerator allows developers the ability to select the tools, programming languages, and libraries they wish to use, as well as the freedom to develop their own applications.
Kim Povlsen, CEO and president of Universal Robots, says: “With the UR AI Accelerator, we give our partners everything they require to design and deploy innovative, new AI solutions.
“We are already a leading platform to bring AI cobots to market, and we are pushing the limits more. The most exciting thing will be observing the effects of these capabilities on our partners and customers.”
James Davidson, chief AI officer at Teradyne Robotics, elaborates: “UR’s AI Accelerator is built for the places where AI is going to be beneficial—in the case of solutions built that use our system, this will speed up the time it takes to deploy your solution and also reduce the risk of development of AI-powered solutions.
“With our objective to take physical AI to an entirely new level, AI Accelerator is just the first to market a series of AI-powered products and capabilities in UR’s pipeline, all with the focused goal of making robotics more accessible than ever before.”
It was unveiled during the same week as hundreds of developers from robots gathered to attend ROSCon 2024, which is UR’s hometown in Odense, Denmark. A demonstration of the UR AI Accelerator with a CNC machine-tending program will be showcased during the ROSCon exhibit.
PolyScope X is a PolyScope X platform that is widely available and can be utilized to automate all cobot applications across all industries.
The advanced flexibility and extensibility will be demonstrated during the PolyScope X Festival in November. PolyScope X Festival in November will showcase a variety of solutions that have been designed with this new platform, which includes AI solutions.
With a minor hardware upgrade, it is now compatible with UR’s e-Series Cobots as well as the latest generation of cobots, UR20 and UR30.
