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

Designed for both commercial and research purposes, the UR AI Accelerator offers developers a versatile platform to create applications, expedite research, and shorten the time to market for AI products.

This toolkit brings AI acceleration to Universal Robots' (UR) advanced software platform, PolyScope X, and is powered by NVIDIA Isaac™ accelerated libraries and AI models, operating on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin™ system-on-module. Specifically, the NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator enables developers to integrate accelerated performance and cutting-edge AI technologies into their robotics solutions. The toolkit also features the newly developed Orbbec Gemini 335Lg 3D camera.

With everything fully integrated, the toolkit provides developers with a complete go-to-market architecture and is ready for immediate use.

The AI Accelerator includes built-in demo programs that utilize UR’s platform to enable functionalities such as pose estimation, tracking, object detection, path planning, image classification, quality inspection, state detection, and more. Thanks to PolyScope X, the UR AI Accelerator also allows developers to select the toolsets, programming languages, and libraries they prefer, giving them the flexibility to create custom 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 during the same week that hundreds of robot software developers are gathering for ROSCon 2024 in UR’s hometown of Odense, Denmark, a demonstration of the UR AI Accelerator featuring a CNC machine tending application will be showcased at the ROSCon exhibition.

The PolyScope X platform is available worldwide and can be utilized for all cobot automation applications across various industries. Its exceptional flexibility and extensibility will be highlighted at the PolyScope X Festival in November, where a range of solutions already developed with this new platform, including AI solutions, will be presented. With a minor hardware upgrade, the software is compatible with UR’s e-Series cobots as well as the new-generation UR20 and UR30 cobots.