KUKA, a renowned industry leader in robotics and automation solutions, recently unveiled our team as the recipient of the KUKA Innovation Award for 2023. This prestigious accolade celebrates exceptional achievements in the field of robotics and automation, recognizing groundbreaking ideas that redefine technology and propel advancements across various industries.
Following an exhaustive selection process, a distinguished panel of judges meticulously evaluated a multitude of submissions from talented participants across the globe. Each entry showcased remarkable creativity, technical expertise, and a profound vision for revolutionizing the realm of automation.
Our project – named JARVIS – captured the judges’ attention with its extraordinary concept and its potential to leave a lasting impact. JARVIS impressed the panel by directly addressing real-world challenges and presenting a truly unique solution that pushes the boundaries of robotics and automation thanks to Artificial Intelligence. JARVIS dealt with the development of a complete plug-and-play method for programming collaborative robotics applications, for example for assembly, machine tending and kitting, which is fully integrated into the iiQKA ecosystem.
Together with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the new iiQKA ecosystem, the concept enables unskilled operators to instruct the robot for a new task and generalize to unknown situations, including new tasks and product variants, without writing any line of code. Thus, thanks to AI, the robot can adapt to changes in the workspace without production downtime. JARVIS is aimed primarily at small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector that want to deploy collaborative robots easily and quickly and use them effectively for kitting, assembly, machine tending applications.
What convinced us most about Team JARVIS is on the one hand the strategic fit to our product strategy and on the other hand the application that offers a solution for kitting or assembly applications – fully integrated into our iiQKA ecosystem. JARVIS is responsive to changes in the environment and can therefore be used in unstructured environments. This is exactly what we increasingly see as potential for automation in small and medium-sized companies.
said Dr. Kristina Wagner, Senior Vice President of the KUKA Automation Software Factory.
We did it! Nothing happens without hard work and dedication.
References:
- KUKA press release https://www.kuka.com/en-de/company/press/news/2023/06/winner-kuka-innovation-award-2023
- KUKA iimagazine https://www.kuka.com/en-de/company/iimagazine/2023/07/innovation-award-winners-2023-interview
- N. Lucci, A.M. Zanchettin, P. Rocco – “Semantic Behaviour Tree Learning through Kinaesthetic Demonstrations”, in preparation.
- A.M. Zanchettin – “Symbolic representation of what robots are taught in one demonstration”, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 166, August 2023.