The robot lab is diverse and well-equipped, supporting a range of research and educational initiatives through rapid-prototyping equipment. We have multiple industrial graded collaborative robot arms that can be deployed in context-specific environments. This not only expedites our research progress in AI and robotics but also accelerates the integration of robots, assisting round-the-clock, into other domains such as bio-engineering labs and economically significant sectors like retail.
Along our collaborative robot armsarms, we house multiple social robots including multiple FurHat robots, two Softbank Pepper robots and 12 Nao robots which are used for human-robot interaction experiments.
For educational project we have more than 1,000 robot kits that are used for societal outreach as well multiple Turtle Bots that are used in our robotics courses. A notable exemplary outreach project with this equipment is WeGoSTEM, which has reached over 30,000 children since 2017.
The robot lab also entails customized hardware including novel robot morphologies as well as customized smart fingertips. For this we have an in-house hardware ecosystem Halberd which was created for seamless integration of tactile sensors on Robotiq grippers to enhance the manipulation capabilities of our cobots: no more external power or data cables! Halberd features extensive GPIO, several communication interfaces, and safety circuitry similar to that of the Robotiq I/O Coupling itself. It is Arduino compatible and programmable over a micro USB interface. Both hardware and software are freely available on GitHub.
