Yaskawa Electric’s new robot with AI and autonomy uses Wind River Linux

Wind River, a provider of software for intelligent systems, says industrial robot-maker Yaskawa is using Wind River Linux for its next-generation Motoman Next series of robots.

Yaskawa is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of servo motor, AC drives, and industrial robots.

Motoman Next is capable of autonomous adaptivity to the environment and can make judgments with advanced AI capabilities. Yaskawa’s new robot is powered by Nvidia Jetson Orin and Wind River Linux to realize new levels of intelligence and autonomy.

It can handle challenging tasks in unstructured environments, driving automation into new application areas that previously were challenging to automate due to the need for human-level perception and judgment capabilities.

Amit Ronen, chief customer officer, Wind River, says: “AI is opening exciting new pathways. We are pleased to support the next generation of AI-capable robotics from an industry leader such as Yaskawa in combination with Wind River Linux and Nvidia Jetson.

“Together with Yaskawa and Nvidia, we can help teams rapidly innovate in machine learning and AI to deliver more intelligent systems.”

Motoman Next can execute tasks based on its judgment of changes in the surrounding environment and the system’s status, including accounting for other robots and peripheral devices.

It can perform tasks that previously required human recognition skills and judgment, such as navigating an optimal path to avoid obstacles or sorting and boxing items of varying color and shape, as well as tasks with many variables and uncertain elements.

Wind River Linux is used in the Motoman Next autonomous control unit, running on Nvidia Jetson Orin.

A platform for edge AI, embedded, and robotics applications, NVIDIA Jetson provides scalable software, a modern AI stack, production-ready ROS packages, and application-specific AI workflows.

It can share AI software and cloud-native workflows while delivering the power-efficient performance required for building software-defined autonomous machines and breakthrough edge AI solutions.

The combination of Wind River Linux and the Nvidia Jetson platform enables advanced-AI edge applications.