The robotics competition was based for the first time on the Kuka robot operating system and associated ecosystem iiQKA. iiQKA offers open interfaces, intuitive operation and makes it easy to implement hardware and software extensions on a Kuka robot. According to the company, this makes automation more accessible and new tasks can be automated, especially in small and medium-sized companies.

"More and more people in new areas and more and more industries are coming into contact with robotics and automation. Innovative software solutions, new cobots and creative concepts are making automation more accessible," said Dr. Kristina Wagner, Senior Vice President of the Kuka Automation Software Factory. "With the tenth round of the Kuka Innovation Award, we have addressed this development. For the first time, our finalists have realized their ideas with iiQKA and our cobot LBR iisy."

The international jury was ultimately won over by the research team from the Merlin Laboratory of the Italian Politecnico di Milano: Jarvis worked on the development of a complete plug & play method for programming collaborative robotics applications, for example for assembly and packaging, which is fully integrated into the iiQKA ecosystem.

Together with the integration of artificial intelligence into the ecosystem, the concept enables unskilled operators to instruct the robot for a new task and generalize to unknown situations, including new tasks and product variants. Thanks to AI, the robot can adapt to changes in the work area without production downtime. Jarvis is primarily aimed at small and medium-sized companies in the manufacturing industry that want to deploy collaborative robots quickly and use them effectively for placement and assembly.

The Kuka Innovation Award 2023

As part of the 'Open Platform Challenge', the motto of this year's Kuka Innovation Awards, young robotics talents from all over the world submitted their innovative concepts for simpler engineering, setup and programming. An international jury selected the three best final teams. They presented their concepts to an international audience of experts directly at the Kuka stand at the automatica trade fair in Munich.