Robotics and Mechatronics
Mobile Robotics Lab
Turnkey solution for advancing education, research and project-based learning in mobile robotics
The Quanser Mobile Robotics Lab offers a turnkey solution for institutions that are looking to build or upgrade their mobile robotics capacity.
The lab offers a comprehensive, ready-to-deploy ecosystem equipped with four innovative QBot Platform mobile robots featuring advanced sensors and high-powered NVIDIA GPUs. Complete with ready-to-use courseware and research examples, the lab stands as a full package to cultivate industry-relevant skills and encourage multidisciplinary teamwork.
QLabs Virtual QBot Platform
Virtual platform for distance and blended undergraduate mobile robotics courses
QLabs Virtual QBot Platform is a fully instrumented, dynamically accurate virtual twin of a QBot Platform, to enrich your lectures and lab activities for your distance and online mobile robotics course.
Introduction to Controls Teaching Lab
Quanser has been the world leader in controls and dynamics educational experiences for over 30 years. Hands-on controls lab experiences are a critical component of every undergraduate student’s engineering education.
Quanser’s Introduction to Controls Teaching Lab, part of the Controls & Dynamics Lab, empowers educators by providing turn-key experiences consisting of hardware, software, digital twins, instructor resources and an interactive student mobile textbook app for controls.
Qube-Servo 3
The quickest path to practical controls
The Qube Servo 3 is the fastest and most efficient way to bring modern, hands-on learning experiences into your Control Systems course. The system is equipped with a high-quality direct-drive brushed DC motor, two encoders, an internal data acquisition system, and an amplifier. Connect with USB to a Windows PC using MATLAB Simulink or Python.
QBot Platform
High-performance autonomous ground robot for indoor labs
The Quanser QBot Platform is an innovative open-architecture autonomous ground robot, built on a differential drive mobile platform.
This solution is ideal for teaching undergraduate and graduate mobile robotics as it is accompanied by comprehensive courseware and equipped with built-in sensors such as LiDAR, front-facing RealSense camera, downward-facing camera, gyroscope, and accelerometer, all powered by an onboard NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano computer.
QArm
Modern manipulator arm for robotics courses and research
Quanser’s QArm is a 4 DOF serial robotic manipulator with a tendon-based two-stage gripper and an RGBD camera, designed for modern engineering education and academic research applications. Leveraging the intuitive graphical interface of Simulink® or expandability of Python™ and ROS, students get a systematic understanding of the design of robotic systems and concepts, including joint control, kinematics, path planning, statics, and dynamics. QArm comes with comprehensive studio-type course resources to motivate students and provide the basis for interactive challenges. The QArm curriculum is mapped to popular robotics textbooks by Mark Spong and John Craig.
The open architecture design of QArm allows researchers to quickly develop and deploy their applications in machine learning, assistive robotics, collaborative robotics, and more, using both custom and internal control schemes.
HD² High Definition Haptic Device
Industry-leading haptic interface for simulation and teleoperation
The HD² High-Definition Haptic Device is a high-fidelity haptic interface for advanced research in haptics as well as robotics. Combined with Quanser’s powerful control design environment, it provides a flexible development test bed for various emerging applications such as virtual medical simulators and teleoperation.
Hexapod
Six degrees fo freedom motion platform for advanced research
The Hexapod is a compact six degrees of freedom parallel robotic motion platform capable of moving up to 100 kg at high acceleration. Unlike most commercially available Stewart platforms, the Hexapod is driven by superior electrical motors which make it precise, responsive and low-maintenance.
About Quanser’s Robotics and Mechatronics Lab
As the potential applications for robotics and automation systems have grown over the last several decades, the need for multipurpose academic robotics and mechatronics labs that can be used to teach fundamental concepts and research potential applications has become irrefutable. The software and electromechanical flexibility of these platforms give unprecedented access to powerful and robust systems that can serve as a core element of a student’s academic career, from introductory mechatronics, robotics, controls, and intelligent systems concepts to design projects, capstone, and graduate-level research.
Comprehensive Platforms for Mechatronics Education: QBot and QArm
The Robotics and Mechatronics Lab is built around a versatile set of platforms that are designed to teach the fundamentals of mechatronics, manipulator robotics, mobile robotics, and many of the associated theories and algorithms. The Robotics and Mechatronics lab systems can also easily extend across a variety of courses and years, bridging into course projects, capstone, and graduate research. Beginning with the QBot Platform, the teaching side of the lab is structured as a collection of “pipelines” that scaffold experiences for students that are centred on problem-based core skill-building activities in mobile and manipulator robotics. The introductory pipelines cover the basics of kinematics and control, while the more advanced pipelines extend into navigation, localization, and path planning before combining both sets of outcomes to extend into task management, communication, and sensor fusion. More advanced manipulator courseware resources are built around the QArm, to take students deeper into manipulator robotics theory and algorithms, extending the curriculum topics into more advanced applications of control and image processing.
Open-Architecture Lab: Project and Research Opportunities
Beyond the teaching applications that the Robotics and Mechatronics Lab can immediately facilitate, the open-architecture design of the lab platforms and software architecture make the lab an ideal studio for projects and research. The systems that are part of the lab can be customized both electromechanically and in software to validate a wide variety of research applications and design concepts, bringing an efficient, reliable, and sustainable set of tools and platforms to generations of course and research projects.
QUARC Software and Language Diversity
To ensure the versatility of the lab platforms, QUARC real-time software for MATLAB Simulink and our Quanser APIs are included to ensure that students and researchers can develop and deploy controllers using several languages. The QUARC libraries that are included in the QUARC package and our academic resource libraries for Python further accelerate the development cycle to make testing and validation quicker and easier than would be possible with standard libraries and tools.
Off-Campus Learning with High-Fidelity Digital Twins
To further expand the versatility of the lab systems and improve accessibility and the overall teaching and research potential of the Robotics and Mechatronics Lab, each lab comes with a set of high-fidelity digital twins that give students and researchers the ability to work with virtual hardware platforms off-campus in almost the same way they would work with the real systems. This opens up a wide variety of options for students to spend more time exploring the algorithms they’re developing, tuning and validating their design approaches, prototyping algorithms and robotic systems, and even creating entire robotic teams to solve ambitious challenges or real-world applications of smart manufacturing, logistics, machine learning, and more.