UR10?collaborative?robot, Autodesk, USA

Robots on the construction site are a rarity, largely due to the fact that traditional industrial robots need to operate within safety cages and cannot easily be moved around. The built-in safety features of Universal Robots enable them to work alongside humans with no safety guarding. This enabled the Autodesk robotic assistant prototype that could be wheeled between tasks, such as cutting out predefined pieces of drywall.

UR10?collaborative?robot,?Autodesk,?USA

Autodesk built voice-enabling software, allowing the operator to simply tell the UR10 when to cut out the drywall. ?

UR10?collaborative?robot,?Autodesk,?USA

“One of the most interesting things that we learned from the HIVE project was that people with a lot of experience in robotics were very impressed with what we were able to do with all the sensors, while people who had never worked with robotics took it for granted.? They assumed this was how this technology worked,” recounts Heather Kerrick, Senior Research Engineer at Autodesk’s Robotics Lab.

UR10?collaborative?robot,?Autodesk,?USA

The goal in building the HIVE pavilion was for users to experience a seamless integration between robotic manufacturing, wearables, RFID tracking, and intelligence embedded in the building pieces. The HIVE project was a collaboration between Autodesk Robotics Lab, ICD University of Stuttgart and attendees at Autodesk University. ?

UR10?collaborative?robot,?Autodesk,?USA

“The UR robots were able to offer very precise movements and very precise measurements that would have been difficult for a human to do on-site, so the human didn’t need anywhere near as many measuring tools or equipment. They were able to go to the robot, get the part that they needed, and then take that back to a construction site,” says Autodesk research engineer Heather Kerrick, whose team successfully created the HIVE in three days.?

UR10?collaborative?robot,?Autodesk,?USA

“One of the major reasons we chose Universal Robots is because it’s safe to work around. I could literally connect the robot to my laptop, work next to it, and quickly iterate through our experiments without worrying about safety protocols slowing things down. This was very important for us to make progress in this project,”?says?Yotto Koga, software architect at Autodesk?

UR10?collaborative?robot,?Autodesk,?USA

The UR robots’ open architecture makes it simple to stream commands. The UR10 robot was able to draw R2D2 falling in love with a mailbox through a simple program that directed the robot to follow the paths of a vector drawing that was projected onto a canvas.