Funding will help team develop ‘plug-and-play’ robots

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

More and more robots are definitely coming to the commercial world and a Waterloo Engineering researcher hopes to speed their arrival by developing cheaper, general-purpose control systems.

At the moment, the high cost of customized robotics applications in workplaces such as warehouses and manufacturing plants largely limits them to huge companies with plenty of money to invest.

But with help from a $140,000 award announced today, Stephen Smith is building a research team to make robots affordable for smaller operations with “plug-and-play” systems that would only have to be adjusted and adapted, not built from scratch.

Read the full story.