Italian research team wins prestigious KUKA Innovation Award

Photo: KUKA Group

The JARVIS research team from the Merlin Laboratory of the Italian Politecnico di Milano recently won the 20,000 euro KUKA Innovation Award 2023 based on the theme of Open Platform Challengefor its innovative concept that involved simple automation with robotics and artificial intelligence: (AI). An international jury selected the winners at the Automatica trade fair in Munich.

The KUKA Innovation Award 2023 was all about simple operation and maximum flexibility of robots. For the first time, the robotics competition was based on the new KUKA robot operating system and associated ecosystem iiQKA on the theme ‘Get started right away, even without expert knowledge’.

iiQKA offers open interfaces, intuitive operation and makes it much easier to implement hardware and software extensions on a KUKA robot. This makes automation more accessible and new tasks can be automated, especially in small and medium-size companies.

Dr Kristina Wagner, senior vice president of the KUKA Automation Software factory, said: “More and more people in new fields and more and more industries are considering the merits of robotics and automation — innovative software solutions, new cobots and creative concepts are making automation more readily available.

“With the 10th round of the KUKA Innovation Award, we addressed this development. For the first time, our finalists implemented their ideas with iiQKA and our Cobot LBR iisy. We were impressed by the concepts around simple operation and maximum flexibility, ideal for small and medium-size companies.”

In the end, the JARVIS research team was chosen as the winner by an international jury which judged the three finalists on the KUKA stand at the recent Automatica trade fair. JARVIS impressed with its development of a complete plug-and-play method for programming collaborative robotics applications, for example for assembly and packaging, 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 too undertake new tasks and adapt to product variants. Utilising AI, the robot can adapt to changes in the workspace without production downtime. JARVIS is aimed primarily at small- and medium-size companies in the manufacturing sector that want to deploy cobots easily and quickly and use them effectively for placement and assembly.

Read more about the Open Platform Challenge here.