KUKA

KUKA Deutschland GmbH (KUKA) is a member of KUKA Aktiengesellschaft (Augsburg) and is the market leader in Germany and Europe and the second biggest industrial robot supplier in the world. It grew out of the company Keller und Knappich (KUKA), which was founded in 1898. At the end of 2014 KUKA Deutschland GmbH employed more than 3600 people worldwide and sales exceeded 830 million Euro.
The KUKA Robot Group has a close relation to both automotive customers and system integrators as full solution providers, yet the share of innovative non-automotive applications is increasing steadily. KUKA Deutschland GmbH has a significant experience in advanced robotics topics dealing with lightweight robots and medical robotics.
KUKA has a track record of successful co-operative research projects, both on a European and national level. Many of those projects deal with aspects of process specific motion and path planning problems. For instance, in the national project RoFaLas motion planning algorithms for Remote Laser Welding were developed by the company. In SMErobot the KUKA Lightweight Robot was successfully applied in production cells of SMEs, and the programming effort of welding of small batches of metal work pieces was significantly decreased by means of programming through especially developed teaching devices and a combination of offline and online programming techniques. KUKA is also the coordinator of the FP7 project TAPAS and H2020 project RobDREAM, and has leading roles in SMErobotics, SAPHARI and VALERI. On national level, KUKA Deutschland GmbH contributed among others to the German Service Robotics Initiative (DESIRE). In the area of medical robotics KUKA was a partner in the project ACTIVE which looked at the compensation of movements during an epileptic fit during neuro surgery. KUKA holds key positions in euRobotics AISBL which represents the European robotics community in a public-private partnership with the EC.