Southwest Research Institute — to many the father of San Antonio’s emerging robotics scene — has engineers working to solve robotic challenges for a variety of industries, including manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, health care and space science.
David Merz, a research engineer at Southwest Research Institute, shows the 3D model that a Yaskawa cobot uses during a “scan and plan” demonstration at SwRI. The cobot was programmed to analyze a space and learn how to wipe off drawings on a round surface.On a recent afternoon, Paul Evans stands beside a small blue and gray robotic arm.
SwRI has nearly 100 electrical, mechanical and software engineers working to solve robotic challenges for a variety of industries, including manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, health care, space science, and mechanical and chemical engineering.
In the mid-1980s, researchers used the large, hydraulic Cincinnati Milacron, one of the first robots here, in an early-stage mobile manipulator for de-riveting aerospace components. The industrial robot had incredible power, but it could rip up the concrete floors if it ever crashed. “I inherited their own interests in engineering and technology that inspired me to become a roboticist,” said Evans, who was born in Tennessee and raised in Alabama and near Des Moines, Iowa.
“A lot of the matrix, linear algebra concepts and scaling and transformations … have a lot of similar concepts similar to motion-control and robotics systems,” he said. By 2009, SwRI engineers began thinking about building larger, faster and cleaner robots that can move between hangars instead of being fixed in one location. That notion led them into the world of large-scale, laser-wielding, mobile robots.
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