Centre Students achieve Entrepreneurial Success

Wolfgang Merkt and research assistants Yiming Yang and Vladimir Ivan are developing a high-performance, high-payload, and high-precision mobile manipulation collaborative robot along with an accompanying AI software platform to target applications such as smart manufacturing. The team is supported by Professor Sethu Vijayakumar as Chief Scientific Advisor.

The project draws on over ten years of experience developing, integrating, and deploying state-of the-art robotic applications in industry and research. Leveraging the CDT Innovation Funding along with personal funds and competition prize money, the team – under the name Adabotics – completed a full prototype that has been used in research projects and evaluation studies and iterated based on industrial customer requirements and user
input.

Adabotics has also been very successful in international business and artificial intelligence competitions including a 2nd Prize at the UK Division Finals of the Shenzhen Innovation & Entrepreneurship International Competition, a 3rd Prize at the Global Finals for Smart Manufacturing of the Shenzhen Innovation & Entrepreneurship International Competition, and the 1st Grand Prize of the Nanjing Global Artificial Intelligence Application Competition. (Images of Yiming Yang and Wolfgang Merkt receiving 1st  prize in the Nanjing Global Artificial Intelligence Application Competition in Nanjing on September 6, 2018 from Nanjing Mayor and Vice Governor of Jiangsu Province Mr Lan Shaomin at the China Artificial Intelligence Summit courtesy of China AI Summit).