At Automatica this week, Micropsi Industries announced that MIRAI, its AI-powered robot controller that trains robots through human demonstration, will soon be hardware agnostic. The company has partnered with KUKA to demo the new version of the system at the German trade show in Messe Müchen.
Visitors to Micropsi Industries' exhibit (Hall B4 Booth 401) will see a MIRAI-controlled KUKA robot inserting industrial connectors into outlets, which Micropsi Industries noted in a press release is “one of myriad complex automation tasks that are too difficult or costly to automate with traditional programming.”
“With innovative technologies like MIRAI, our customers benefit from even more versatility to automate applications they couldn't automate before,” Christian Felkel, vice president of Industry Management Electronics at KUKA, said in a statement. “With MIRAI, they can now automate these applications much faster and more affordably than possible with other programming.”
In an interview with Robotics 24/7 Dominik Bösl, chief technology officer of Micropsi Industries, said the company decided to make MIRAI hardware agnostic to help it become a “universal component.”
“From now on, if a customer approaches us and wants to make a deal, we are happy to supply any robot platform that they want,” he said.
Micropsi Industries worked with voraus robotikk, a software integration company, to develop a middleware layer to make MIRAI hadware agnostic.
MIRAI starting with KUKA
Starting Q4, MIRAI will be available for KUKA robots. Soon after that, it will work with other collaborative robots and industrial robots by request.
MIRAI previously only worked with robot arms made by Universal Robots and FANUC.
“Our new integration with KUKA expands the number of users who can use MIRAI to automate applications that were previously not feasible or cost-effective to automate such as cable insertion, gear picking or leak testing,” Bosil said in a statement. “And this is just the beginning as we continue to push the boundaries of automation. By making MIRAI available to all automation professionals, regardless of the robot platform they prefer, they can create flexible and high-performing robotic movement without the need for expensive and difficult coding.”
MIRAI makes programming a robot simpler
The MIRAI system was designed to make programming robots faster and easier, the company said. It's as simple as guiding a robot by hand.
“To train a robot, a human performs repeated demonstrations of a task by manually guiding the robot by the robot’s wrist. The movements are recorded by a nearby camera and a force torque sensor and are then transformed into a MIRAI skill,” the company stated on its website.
“By combining Micropsi Industries' AI-powered control system with our agnostic integration with any robot, automating dynamic production environments will no longer pose a challenge,” said Dr. Jens Kotlarski, founder and CEO of voraus robotic, in a statement. “We have found a strong partner in Micropsi Industries to take robotics and automation to the next level together.”
Automatica runs from June 27 to June 30.
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