Partnership Brings Robots to Community College and Local Businesses
Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) has partnered with a local startup to help bring collaborative robots, or cobots, to businesses in the area.
Cobots are designed to work with human beings on a range of repetitive or dangerous tasks, such as screw driving, painting or manufacturing tasks. The devices are also designed to be relatively inexpensive and to be repurposed from one task to another without complicated coding.
The move is a collaboration between CNM Ingenuity, an enterprise arm of the college, and Build with Robots, a startup based in Albuquerque that sells cobots. As part of the partnership, Build with Robots is housed in CNM Ingenuity's Fuse Makerspace and CNM Ingenuity is managing training related to the robots, including classes, seminars and informational sessions.
In return, Build with Robots is providing the college with access to robots for students, internships and other opportunities for students and other makerspace members, regular robot demonstrations and pilot applications and assistance to CNM with curriculum development for robot technology courses.
"This partnership is helping us provide a whole new level of support and expertise to small businesses that are trying to find cost-effective manufacturing solutions to advance their businesses," said Kyle Lee, CNM Ingenuity executive director, in a prepared statement. "We're also introducing robot technology to our community through workshops that will help more people understand how human skills and robot technology can coexist in the workforce of the future."
About the Author
Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].