Engineers, scientists and mathematicians in the Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe) at King’s College London are working on a number of different projects, each designed to take robot technology forward. Their time horizon is 25 years or more; the idea is not so much small scale improvements to existing technologies but the foundation of fundamentally new solutions – sometimes to problems that have yet to arise! To do this they set up test rigs with state of the art robots and try to develop new functions and capabilities.

One of its busiest test rigs is based on the RV3SD one of the latest Mitsubishi Electric industrial robots, which is designed to offer high performance and reliability to address demanding applications across many industries. Utilising Mitsubishi’s own servo and motion technologies the robot provides the speed, precision, power and repeatability required for reliable testing and development projects.

Many of the Centre’s projects require the handling of large amounts of complex data. The researchers find that Mitsubishi’s programming, modelling and diagnostic software are intuitive to use and powerful enough to cope, thus making the experiments easier to execute.

Professor Maria Fox explains the Centre’s strategic direction: “Today’s robots are very impressive, especially when you consider how quickly they have developed since the first generation of the technology. We can now foresee the imminent achievement of a significant developmental goal, the ability to integrate multiple tasks of very different natures.

The full article can be read here.