Kit will lead to a new wave of AI-powered cobot innovations
22 October 2024 
The Danish collaborative robot (cobot) developer, Universal Robots, has announced a hardware and software toolkit for developing AI-powered cobot applications. The ready-to-use UR AI Accelerator kit provides an extendable platform for building applications, accelerating research, and reducing time-to-market for AI technologies.
The kit brings AI acceleration to UR’s PolyScope X software platform and is powered by Nvidia’s Isaac accelerated libraries and AI models running on an Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin system-on-module. Nvidia’s Isaac Manipulator is used to bring accelerated performance and AI technologies to robotics applications. The kit also includes a 3D camera – the new Orbbec Gemini 335Lg system.
The AI Accelerator uses UR’s platform to enable functions such as pose estimation, tracking, object detection, path planning, image classification, quality inspection, state detection and so on. It gives developers the freedom to choose which toolsets, programming languages and libraries 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 UR president and CEO, Kim Povlsen. “We are already a leading platform for taking AI cobot applications to market, and now we are pushing the boundaries even further.”
“UR’s AI Accelerator is built for where AI will really make a difference – it will decrease your time-to-deployment while also de-risking the development of AI-based solutions,” adds James Davidson, chief AI officer at UR’s parent, Teradyne Robotics. “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 UR AI Accelerator was demonstrated in a CNC machine-tending application at a recent meeting of hundreds of robot software developers in UR’s home town of Odense, Denmark.
