Collaborations Foster New AI-Powered Autonomous Inspection Solutions

June 6, 2024

Teradyne Robotics’ Ujjwal Kumar demonstrates new AI-powered solutions and opportunities at Automate 2024.

Related To: Teradyne

Teradyne took full advantage of a going trend among robotics and automation contenders: strategic alliances that mutually benefit.

The company, known for automating repetitive manual tasks and electronic testing, brought together two of its leading brands—Universal Robots and MiR—at Automate 2024, at once driving home the company’s integration capabilities.

“The glue that brings UR and MiR together is this whole philosophy,” touted Ujjwal Kumar, group president of Teradyne Robotics. “We must build that ecosystem, whether the MiR Go ecosystem program or the UR+ platform. It allows us to bring in bigger players in the robotics space to solve problems for our industrial customers.”

A demonstrable example was a mobile robot from Enabled Robotics and adjoining a UR cobot mounted on the MiR250 AMR. The cobot could collect and return baskets to nearby shelves.

With the incorporation of artificial intelligence and the AMR’s analytic software, mobile cobots are able to deal with unstructured environments and minimize programming requirements for manufacturers, said Kumar.

The idea of cross-promoting technologies may not yet be business as usual for some OEMs. According to Kumar, an alignment of technologies is what makes it feasible for companies like NVIDIA to lend their AI technologies to automation solutions to solve customer problems in new ways.

Bringing AI to Robotics

Back in March, Teradyne reported that UR had integrated NVIDIA accelerated computing into its cobot for faster planning, making path planning 50-80x faster than today's solutions.

The combination of technologies—the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, a complete system-on-module (SOM) designed for edge AI applications, the cuMotion path planner and optimizer from the NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator platform, UR's new PolyScope X software and its UR5e cobot platform—are spawning a range of automation applications and programming possibilities. Foremost, harnessing these technologies will streamline setup time and bolster automation capacity in high-mix, low-volume scenarios.

About the Author

Rehana Begg | Editor-in-Chief, Machine Design

As Machine Design’s content lead, Rehana Begg is tasked with elevating the voice of the design and multi-disciplinary engineer in the face of digital transformation and engineering innovation. Begg has more than 24 years of editorial experience and has spent the past decade in the trenches of industrial manufacturing, focusing on new technologies, manufacturing innovation and business. Her B2B career has taken her from corporate boardrooms to plant floors and underground mining stopes, covering everything from automation & IIoT, robotics, mechanical design and additive manufacturing to plant operations, maintenance, reliability and continuous improvement. Begg holds an MBA, a Master of Journalism degree, and a BA (Hons.) in Political Science. She is committed to lifelong learning and feeds her passion for innovation in publishing, transparent science and clear communication by attending relevant conferences and seminars/workshops.

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