Playware and robotics professor, Henrik Hautop Lund, was supervisor for two of the students (Esben Østergaard and Kasper Støy) for a decade for their bachelor, master, Ph.D. degrees and Post Doc positions, and the third one (Kristian Kassow, DTU) as research assistant. Together with Prof. Lund (in his former LEGO Lab - AU and Adaptronics group - SDU), they developed playful and user-friendly human-robot interaction, exemplified with LEGO robotics and mini-robot soccer, based on modern artificial intelligence such as behavior-based robotics, evolutionary robotics, and neural network control. This led to understanding of how any user can be motivated to control robots themselves with the modern AI principles. They worked on the EU project on self-reconfigurable robotics and national project on flexible robots for the food industry, both with Prof. Lund as principal investigator. Based on this knowledge on playful, user-friendly, simple and adaptive control from a decade of basic playware and modern AI robotics research, they founded the Universal Robots company to disrupt the industrial robotics sector with new lightweight, user-friendly, user-controllable and safe robot arms. This Universal Robots company with this disruptive technology was sold for 1.9 billion DKK in cash to the Boston-based Teradyne, which develops automation test systems.
"“I am profoundly happy to see how some of my brightest students and assistants have been able to build upon the basic research that we performed together..." "
Professor Henrik Hautop Lund
Professor Henrik Hautop Lund says: “I am profoundly happy to see how some of my brightest students and assistants have been able to build upon the basic research that we performed together for a decade to disrupt the industry by implementing principles from that basic research. It shows that performing free, foundational research – in this case on playful robotics – can lead to disruption of the industry and high value for society. They deserve the recognition and admiration, and they serve as an excellent example for our other students to follow.”
More info in Wall Street Journal
Universal Robots webside: Universal Robots