|

Universal Robots Unveils Its AI Accelerator, Enabling a New Wave of AI-Powered Cobot Innovations

January 16, 2025

Universal Robots unveils its AI Accelerator, enabling a new wave of AI-powered cobot innovations

Universal Robots, the Danish collaborative robot (cobot) company, has presented for the first time the UR AI Accelerator – a ready-to-use hardware and software toolkit created to further enable the development of AI-powered cobot applications.

Designed for commercial and research applications, the UR AI Accelerator provides developers with an extensible platform to build applications, accelerate research and reduce time to market of AI products.

The toolkit brings AI acceleration to Universal Robots’ (UR) next-generation software platform PolyScope X and is powered by NVIDIA Isaac™ accelerated libraries and AI models, running on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin™ system-on-module. Specifically, NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator gives developers the ability to bring accelerated performance and state-of-the-art AI technologies to their robotics solutions. The toolkit also includes the high-quality, newly developed Orbbec Gemini 335Lg 3D camera.

With everything seamlessly integrated, the toolkit offers developers full go-to-market architecture and is ready to use straight out of the box.

Through in-built demo programs, the AI Accelerator leverages UR’s platform to enable features like pose estimation, tracking, object detection, path planning, image classification, quality inspection, state detection and more. Enabled by PolyScope X, the UR AI Accelerator also gives developers the freedom to choose exactly what toolsets, programming languages and libraries they want to use and the flexibility to create their own programs.

“With the UR AI Accelerator, we provide our partners with everything they need to develop and deploy new, innovative AI solutions,” says Kim Povlsen, CEO and President of Universal Robots. “We are already a leading platform for taking AI cobot applications to market and now we are pushing the boundaries even further. The most exciting part will be seeing the impact of these new capabilities for our partners and end customers.”

James Davidson, Chief AI Officer, Teradyne Robotics, elaborates:

“UR’s AI Accelerator is built for where AI will really make a difference – if you’re building solutions on our platform, it will decrease your time to deployment while also de-risking the development of AI-based solutions. With our objective to take physical AI to an entirely new level, AI Accelerator is just the first to market of 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.”

Unveiled the same week that sees hundreds of robot software developers gathering for ROSCon 2024 in UR’s hometown of Odense, Denmark, a demo of the UR AI Accelerator with a CNC machine tending application will be displayed at the ROSCon exhibition.

“UR’s AI Accelerator is built for where AI will really make a difference – if you’re building solutions on our platform, it will decrease your time to deployment while also de-risking the development of AI-based solutions. With our objective to take physical AI to an entirely new level, AI Accelerator is just the first to market of 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.”

The PolyScope X platform is globally available and can be used for all cobot automation applications across industries. Its advanced flexibility and extensibility will be showcased at the PolyScope X Festival in November, presenting a range of the solutions already developed with this new platform, including AI solutions. With a small hardware upgrade, the software is compatible with UR’s e-Series cobots and the new-generation cobots UR20 and UR30.

Source

Related Story

Universal Robots Updates Payload Capacity for UR20 and UR30

Universal Robots, the Danish collaborative robot (cobot) company, is now increasing the payload capacity on its new-generation, high-payload cobots UR20 and UR30, enabling customers to lift more at no additional cost.

Related Articles


Latest Articles

  • Identifying, Assessing and Minimizing Risks: Designing Safe Mobile Robots

    February 5, 2025 Mobile robots – whether it be automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems or autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) – are playing an increasing important role in mobile intralogistics because they significantly increase automation and efficiency in warehouses, production facilities and distribution centers. They general share their operating area with people. Special requirements on their design… Read More…

  • Lighting Up the Quantum Computing Horizon with Aurora

    January 28, 2025 A peek inside Xanadu’s latest and greatest photonic quantum computer—Aurora. By Zachary Vernon The Xanadu team has recently announced the successful completion of Aurora, their latest photonic quantum computer. This machine follows in a line of successively more sophisticated earlier systems demonstrations, including X8 and Borealis. Both of those were ground-breaking in their own right: X8 brought… Read More…


Featured Article

Revolutionizing Material Movement with Autonomous Mobile Robots

Revolutionizing Material Movement with Autonomous Mobile Robots

In today’s fast-paced manufacturing and logistics industries, the need for efficient and flexible material movement solutions has never been greater. Traditional methods like conveyor systems, forklifts, and manual pushcarts have served us well, but they come with limitations.

That’s why Omron is thrilled to announce the launch of their game-changing MD Series of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs). Read more


Products

  • 3 Benefits of Enclosure Heaters: Keeping Your Equipment Safe and Operational

    February 5, 2025 Electrical enclosures are critical to safeguarding sensitive IT and electrical components, but they can be vulnerable to extreme temperatures and humidity. This is where enclosure heaters come in—compact, efficient systems designed to maintain a stable internal environment within your enclosures, regardless of external conditions. In this article, we’ll explore the three primary… Read More…

  • Hammond Power Solutions Launches New Smart Transformers for Predictive Energy Management

    February 5, 2025 Hammond Power Solutions proudly announces the launch of HPS Smart Transformers, now available for medium and low voltage transformers. This advanced solution integrates IIoT-enabled power monitors to provide critical data insights, empowering users to proactively analyze and address potential issues before they lead to costly downtime. HPS Smart Transformers are designed to give… Read More…