The era of collaborative robots equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) has begun.

Universal Robots, the world's No. 1 collaborative robot company, announced on the 22nd that it has released the 'UR AI Accelerator', a hardware and software toolkit that will accelerate the development of AI-based collaborative robot applications.

The UR AI Accelerator is Universal Robots’ first AI solution designed for commercial and research use, providing developers with a scalable platform to build collaborative robot applications, accelerate research, and shorten time to market for AI products.

The UR AI accelerator is based on NVIDIA Isaac acceleration libraries and AI models running on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin system-on-module and includes the newly developed, high-quality Orbbec Gemini 335Lg 3D camera.

Isaac Manipulator, a collection of NVIDIA acceleration libraries and AI foundation models for robotic arms, gives developers the ability to bring accelerated performance and cutting-edge AI techniques to their robotics solutions.

The Isaac Manipulator teaches collaborative robot arms how to see, grasp, and move objects.

Collaboration with AIUniversal Robots' challenge to revolutionize bots is ongoing.

With the release of this AI toolkit, we plan to accelerate the internalization of AI into Universal Robots' next-generation software platform, 'PolyScope X'.

The Polyscope X is flexible and scalable for collaborative robot automation applications across industries.

Users of Universal Robots’ e-Series cobots and next-generation cobots UR20 and UR30 can now use the PolyScope X platform after a hardware upgrade.

Universal Robots will be showcasing a range of solutions, including the Polyscope X, at the Polyscope X festival in November.

The UR AI Accelerator implements functions such as pose estimation, tracking, object detection, path planning, image classification, quality inspection, and condition detection by leveraging UR’s platform through built-in demo programs. Supported by Polyscope X, the UR AI Accelerator provides developers with the freedom to choose their desired toolset, programming language, and library, as well as the flexibility to create their own programs.

“With the UR AI Accelerator, we will provide our partners with everything they need to develop and deploy new, innovative AI solutions,” said Kim Povlsen, CEO of Universal Robots. “We are already a leading platform for bringing AI cobot applications to market, and we are now pushing the boundaries even further.”

The UR AI Accelerator was showcased at ROSCon 2024, a robotics software developer conference held in Odense, Denmark on the 21st.