KIT Offers Worldwide Online Access to Robot Laboratory

At the “KUKA Udacity Robot Learning Lab,“ Students and Researchers from All over the World Test Programs and Algorithms

Im Robot Learning Lab des KIT können Studenten und Wissenschaftler über das Internet echte Industrieroboter steuern und so ihre Programme testen. (Foto: KUKA) — At KIT‘s Robot Learning Lab, students and scientists can control real industry robots via the internet and, hence, test their programs. (Photo: KUKA)

Gaining practical experience online – this sounds contradictory, but will be possible soon at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). At the education and research institution, the first robotics learning laboratory of its kind will be established. Apart from students and researchers of KIT, thousands of online users from all over the world will be given access. On the Udacity education platform, they will have the opportunity to control the robots made by high-tech manufacturer KUKA via a web interface and to test their programs and algorithms developed. In this way, KIT will enable robotics students to work on real industrial and scientific problems. In return, the researchers hope to get the crowd’s support in solving these problems.

“Our robots will run seven days a week, 24 hours a day. This is a vast potential for crowd experiments,” says Torsten Kröger, Head of KIT’s Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics, where the KUKA Udacity Robot Learning Lab will be established. He is responsible for intelligent process automation and robotics. At the Robot Learning Lab, students in Karlsruhe and those logging in via the internet are given access to KUKA’s lightweight robot arms with grippers for testing. By the end of this year, the number of robots will further increase. The robot arms can be activated online. In a livestream, students can then observe via cameras how the industry robots follow their commands.

Full Text: Press Release 033/2018

mex, 28.03.2018