ABB RobotStudio and Training Robots in Simulation

Engineers used to test almost everything physically. NASA put scale models of the Space Shuttle in wind tunnels to see how they behaved. For robots, testing meant building a real cell, running it and fixing whatever crashed, one expensive attempt at a time.

A Space Shuttle orbiter model in a NASA wind tunnel, 1980. Photo: NASA / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB's RobotStudio moved much of that work onto a laptop more than twenty years ago. It runs the same control software as the real robot, so engineers can lay out and program a cell and check it for collisions before anything is bolted to the floor. ABB says about 60,000 customers use it.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

AI-driven robots now need huge amounts of training data. On September 1, Oslo startup Kinetic Blocks opened a beta marketplace where companies buy and sell humanoid training data, including teleoperation recordings and first-person video. Real examples are slow to collect, which is why simulated data matters more every year.

A Unitree G1 humanoid, the kind of robot trained on large datasets. Photo: Sayanesy / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB's tool for this is RobotStudio HyperReality, built with NVIDIA Omniverse and announced in March. It renders photorealistic scenes with changing light, reflections and misaligned parts, and produces synthetic images to train robot vision. ABB says Foxconn reached 99 percent accuracy on assembly tasks this way before its robots touched the real line.

Engineers share a robot cell design through RobotStudio Cloud. Photo: ABB

RobotStudio Cloud lets a team edit the same cell design at the same time from different places, and AR and VR views let engineers walk around a virtual cell before it exists. ABB plans to release HyperReality to all RobotStudio users in the second half of this year.

Using an AR headset to check a GoFa cell before it is built. Photo: ABB

Home robots will need the same approach, since no company can let a robot practice in thousands of real living rooms. My bet is on a digital copy of your home, built from a phone scan, where a robot rehearses tidying up before it tries the real thing.

A home a future robot might first learn to tidy in simulation. Photo: Justin Schüler / Unsplash via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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