AI application development for cobots

Designed for commercial and research applications, the new AI toolkit helps speed development of AI-powered cobot applications

A demo of the UR AI Accelerator with a CNC machine tending application. (Image: Universal Robots)

Danish cobot maker Universal Robots has unveiled its AI Accelerator, a ready-to-use hardware and software toolkit created to further enable the development of AI-powered cobot applications.

Designed for commercial and research applications, the UR AI Accelerator provides developers with an extensible platform to build applications, accelerate research and reduce time to market of AI products.

The toolkit brings AI acceleration to Universal Robots’ (UR) next-generation software platform PolyScope X and is powered by NVIDIA Isaac accelerated libraries and AI models, running on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin system-on-module. Specifically, NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator gives developers the ability to bring accelerated performance and state-of-the-art AI technologies to their robotics solutions. The toolkit also includes the high-quality, newly developed Orbbec Gemini 335Lg 3D camera.


Through in-built demo programs, the AI Accelerator leverages UR’s platform to enable features like pose estimation, tracking, object detection, path planning, image classification, quality inspection, state detection and more. Enabled by PolyScope X, the UR AI Accelerator also gives developers the freedom to choose exactly what toolsets, programming languages and libraries they want to use and the flexibility to create their own programs.

UR says AI Accelerator is just the first to market of a series of AI-powered products and capabilities in UR’s pipeline with the goal of making robotics more accessible.

With a small hardware upgrade, the software is compatible with UR’s e-Series cobots and the new-generation cobots UR20 and UR30.