Collaborative robots for mobile robot application

Contracting authority is publishing direct award notice for 'Collaborative robots for mobile robot application'.

BACKGROUND INFO Automation and robotics plays an increasingly important role in technology and economy. Tampere University (TAU) conducts robotics education and research in the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences., Unit of Automation Technology and Mechanical Engineering. TAU has a world-class research infrastructure to conduct robotics research, both in outdoor-focused non-road mobile machines and indoor-focused industrial collaborative robotics, in applications such as simultaneous localization and mapping and vision-based position and orientation estimation algorithms. TAU also offers a Master of Science education programme in Robotics since 2023. FAST-Lab (Future Automation Systems and Technologies Laboratory) specialises in Research related to the fields of Automation, Industrial Informatics, Industrial Cyberphysical Systems, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. The main application domains for our research are Factory Automation, Healthcare Automation and Smart Mobility, Building the future Smart Factories, Smart Healthcare and Smart Cities. NEED FAST-Lab has a need for a specific setup where a mobile robot will have two collaborative robots on top of it. This is for research use for a special use case that contracting authority can not further elaborate (for confidentiality reasons). MARKET ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION FOR DIRECT AWARD Contracting authority has chosen to use Universal Robots in this application due to the compatibility with MiR mobile robot already in use. This mobile robot has the support and API for easy integration with the UR5e robot. This is also widely proofed and used integration concept in the industry and has really wide support for the programming and integration point of view. University is using ROS as a programming language for this specific setup and this is made possible with specified combination of robots. After market survey contracting authority’s concusion is that there is only one official dealer for UR5e robots in Finland, Oy Machine Tool Co.