Robot Garden: A playground just for Robots

As beneficial as inspection robots are, they might suffer from limitations if they are not trained in an environment simulating the industrial environment they will be deployed at. Therefore, Cognite gathered forces with Aker Solutions, TESS, and Createc, to build an innovative testing and training facility for inspection robots, called Robot Garden, which will help take robotics' impact on industrial safety and efficiency to new heights.

Robot Garden is located at Fornebu, Oslo, and acts as a local test and training facility to train robots in a realistic environment, similar to the environment where they will be deployed, thus enhancing their mission efficiency and helping robot users get the most out of their robot deployments.

The main driver behind Robot Garden is to test the robustness of the training AI models in different challenging deployment scenarios such as bad weather, bad lighting, uneven terrain, etc.

In addition, TESS provides a simulation panel that can simulate various industrial defects such as hotspots, liquids and gas leakage, vibration, etc.

Robot Garden aims to: 

• Enable our customers to train their operators and test their robots before bringing them offshore. 
• Increase our knowledge of automated Robot handling solutions
• Increase our awareness of the Robots’ hardware capabilities
• Empower our continuous development of automated data handling algorithms libraries
• Improve how we can detect and report on different faults the robot can see

That being said, it's you and your testing process that makes Robot Garden as important and beneficial as we aim for it to be. So please feel free to join us, bring your hardware equipment, prepare your testing scenarios, and have fun while learning more about how robots can help automate and streamline your processes. See you there!

If you are unable to join in person, let us know in this thread what are your biggest challenges with inspection robots and how would you benefit from a testing facility like Robot Garden if you had easy access to it.