Faraday

Faraday is an AGV built by Robohub enhanced with the UR3 robotic arm and a gripper used for the Robocup@work 2018. Its origin is quite a chaotic story… Originally we tried to compete at the Robocup@work league with the “Kuka Youbot” which was the standard platform used by all teams. As traumatising as it was, a driver in the robot did brake shortly before the competition. There were no reserve components available as this platform had reached its end-of-life. Robohub – being the only applied science university competing at the competition – decided to not give up but to start an innovation which hadn’t been done before at that time within the competition: “building our own AGV suitable for the league”.

After a lot of late hours of: designing, finding sponsors and producing the robot, Faraday was born. We did compete at the qualifications of 2018 with our robot which did quickly receive the nickname “Frankenstein” due to its lack of cable management and bulkiness. But one who doesn’t get pulled back by criticism will succeed. We proofed that our robot did work and did score points during the competition and we even got invited to the world finals in Toronto Canada because of our new approach in innovating the league. We did reject this offer in order to fully focus on develop Faraday’s successor: “SuII”. 

After the creation of Suii, Faraday has been used as a modular AGV for research purposes and to test our navigation software. Faraday was later deconstructed and used as a donor for a new big RoboHub project “Lau” an autonomous Toilet cleaning Robot. The soul of Faraday is still alive within our portfolio. It’s an amazing, educational and not to forget a hectic memory.