Automate Highlight Series: UR and MiR Showcase the Power of Collaboration

The Automate trade show is one of the capstone events covering robotics and control systems from around the globe. I’m always honored to be invited to speak with subject matter experts and professionals across a wide range of product lines, industries, and applications.

This year, I’d like to highlight a few of our meetings with a deep dive into the showcased technology. One of the first meetings of the show was the booth that (very appropriately) collaborated the efforts of two Teredyne companies: Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR).

The brand-new UR15 cobot from Universal Robots.

UR: Brand-New Cobot and Partner Demos

A center-stage event kicking off this exciting week was the unveiling of the new UR15 collaborative robot. This robot fills a medium-payload capacity niche, coming in with a heavier payload than the UR10e but with a significant size and footprint reduction compared to the larger UR20. A top linear speed of up to 5 m/s and an impressive 0.05 mm repeatability work together to boost cycle time and reliability performance.

On the software side, the inclusion of Polyscope X allows the UR15 to be equipped with more powerful algorithms to tackle projects that were previously impossible, from optimized motion path planning to the seamless inclusion of vision programs and much more.

UR+ ecosystem partner demos were in full swing as well, such as a trainable, explosion-proof painting application called the 20XP from A.I. Automation and the force-sensitive dual arm guidance system from Acumino.

Acumino’s dual-arm demo that uses force to guide the path of a wire.

MiR and the Teradyne Community

While collaboration between robots and humans is now in its second decade of maturity, another platform to consider is that of mobility. MiR combines the expertise of rolling motion with object detection sensors to create a safe method of transporting materials.

Most commonly, MiR mobile robots can be found hauling pallets or containers, but as battery and charging technology advances, there are more use cases for the ultimate robot experience: a cobot mounted on a mobile robot!

One of the most convincing cases for this dual integration is the tending of CNC machines. While a fixed robot (a UR15, for example) may be able to load and unload a machine, it spends a lot of its time idle, waiting for the process to finish. To solve this problem, a human worker can move the robot on a cart between machines. Or, even better, a mobile platform can transport the robot automatically between stations, maximizing the ROI for both robots working together.

The Future of UR, MiR, and Collaboration

Tech is always hard to predict. What will we see in 5-10 years? We can be sure of one thing. Robots are getting adopted into more and more collaborative applications, which means a large emphasis will be placed on increasing the precision and speed of cobots while also maintaining the safety standards that keep the workplace moving smoothly.

Thanks, UR! My son had a great time assembling this set!

Hopefully, there will continue to be more cool Lego sets as well.