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

Universal Robots, the Danish collaborative robot (cobot) company, has today 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.

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.

See image collection here.