PRODUCT, TECHNOLOGY & SERVICES INNOVATION — Production Introduction

KINOVA’s Gen3 family of robotic arms supports research efforts and spurs commercial development Organization Name: Country: Website: Year Founded: Number of Employees: Innovation Class: Innovation Subclass:

KINOVA Canada www.kinovarobotics.com 2006 160+ Product, Technology & Services Production Introduction

Description: Following several years of research and development work, and in close collaboration with research centers worldwide, in January 2019, KINOVA announced the commercial launch of the KINOVA Gen3 robotic arm. It is a 7-DoF (degrees-of-eedom), lightweight (carbon-fiber) collaborative robotic arm specifically engineered for research and commercial labs. The Gen3 system boasts of embedded 2D (RBG) and 3D (Intel RealSense) vision, and an interface module offering a variety of options for connectivity and end effector development. In March 2020, the company extended the Gen3 line with the Gen3 Lite, an ultralight arm designed for light manipulation tasks.

Analysis: Academic and commercial R&D efforts are the wellspring of most robotics innovation, including early experimentation and development for commercial-class robotics systems. Collaborative robotics arms are commonly employed as research tools, but the suppliers of most cobots consider research to be a secondary or tertiary target market aer the manufacturing, logistics, and other commercial sectors. Since its founding, KINOVA focused on supplying highly versatile, off-the-shelf robotics technologies for academic and commercial R&D -- initially, personal assistance systems.

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The company has been working with partners to provide robotics solutions for challenging, typically low-volume applications. This approach has resulted in KINOVA arms acting as adaptable research tools for many commercial solutions, or as the platform on which a wide range of commercial systems and applications are built. Examples include bomb disposal and hazmat robots, surgical systems, field robotics technologies and more. With the release of the Gen3 and Gen3 Lite systems, robotics innovation will be better supported in just this way. RR -- Dan Kara

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