Universal Robots Wants to Help You Build Physical Collaborative AI Agents with Its AI Accelerator

Collaborative robotics specialist Universal Robots has launched an AI Accelerator bundle, designed to deliver a ready-to-run toolkit for those looking to work on artificially intelligent (AI) "cobots" — developed in partnership with NVIDIA and Orbbec.

"With the UR AI Accelerator, we provide our partners with everything they need to develop and deploy new, innovative AI solutions," claims Universal Robots' president and chief executive officer Kim Povlsen. "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."

The bundle is based around a high-performance NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX 64GB system-on-module installed in a robust industrial chassis with the just-unveiled Orbbec Gemini 335Lg stereo vision 3D camera for vision and depth sensing. The system comes pre-loaded with a series of demos built atop Universal Robots' PolyScope X platform — demonstrating everything from pose estimation and tracking to object detection, path planning, image classification, quality inspection, and state detection.

Universal Robots is showcasing the new AI Accelerator kit at ROSCon 2024 this week, putting the platform in charge of tending to a running CNC machine. For those with existing hardware from the company, the base bundle includes just the Jetson, camera, and mounting hardware; a mid-tier bundle adds the company's Control Box electrical interface; and the top-end bundle includes one of the company's e-Series robot arms as well.

"UR's AI Accelerator is built for where AI will really make a difference," claims James Davidson, chief AI officer at Universal Robots' parent company Teradyne Robotics. "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."

More information on the AI Accelerator is available on the Universal Robots website; the company is taking pre-orders now ahead of shipping in November, though has not publicly disclosed pricing.