Inside world’s first ‘cobot hub’

The world’s first “cobot hub” has opened in Denmark’s third-largest city, Odense. The new $45 million headquarters for Teradyne-owned Universal Robots and MiR (Mobile Industrial Robots) is hoping to capitalize on a growing demand for collaborative robots in industries, such as logistics, pharmaceutical, food, beverage, and more. The new 20,000-square-meter facility is intended to foster innovation between the two companies. Both Universal Robots and MiR build “cobots,” collaborative robots designed to work safely alongside humans. Universal Robots president Kim Povlsen says cobots first found their place in the automotive industry, but now they’re popping up everywhere—from logistics and pharmaceutical to food, beverage, and more. “We’re seeing the need for automation in pretty much every industry out there,” he says. Now, artificial intelligence is entering the scene, a “breakthrough within robotics,” says Universal Robots’ vice president of strategy and innovation, Anders Billesoe Beck. “What we’ve seen in so many other industries is AI is the tool to bring the human reasoning into something that’s more automated, and that’s really some of the barriers for robotics today,” he says. “AI is really becoming a superpower, both to make the robot easier to program, but also to give them that sort of problem-solving capabilities and flexibilities that is sort of associated with human intelligence.” Universal Robots is collaborating with industry giants Siemens and Nvidia to bring AI into its cobots, such as this AI-generated quality inspection robot. “The robot moves around to a number of electronics components, quality-assuring that all the components are there. But all the motions in between is fully generated by AI,” explains Billesoe Beck. “It calculates where to go. It calculates to avoid any obstacles in the workspace. So, everything is run fully automatically." Odense is now considered one of Europe’s main robotics hubs, with more than 160 companies. Soeren Elmer Kristensen, CEO of Odense Robotics, Denmark’s national robot cluster, says the new cobot hub shows they are capable of keeping “big industries within the country.” “It's a big milestone, I would say, for cobots, in general. A big milestone for Danish robotics,” he says. This article was provided by The Associated Press.