Working at a hotel reception desk, serving glasses of wine or even taking part in rescuing people during a natural disaster are among the tasks that the robots now housed at Spain’s Humanoid Robotics Training Center (CERH) will be able to perform. The facility, a European pioneer, opened in Zaragoza on Monday under Grupo UB.
The company inaugurated its facilities on Monday, where around 20 robots are already being trained, and signed a collaboration agreement under which Tekio Robotics, a Grupo UB company, becomes Agibot’s master distributor for Spain, Portugal and Africa. Agibot is the world’s leading manufacturer of humanoid robots with real-world interaction.
THEY CAN LEARN MORE THAN HALF OF HUMAN SKILLS
These robots have a “humanist” approach, Grupo UB President Jesús Urbano explained, as they are intended to assist people with tasks that may be strenuous or even dangerous. They are capable of developing around 65% of human skills, with progress that Urbano described as “very rapid.”
The center, located at the Plaza Logistics Platform, is far more than a simple demonstration space. It operates as a high-tech complex where the most advanced humanoid robots on the market are programmed, trained and adapted to each client’s needs. As a result, they cover an almost limitless range of uses, with applications already being developed in industrial environments and in the services and third sectors.
For Urbano, the launch of this center puts Aragon “on the global map for the design and customized computing of humanoid robots,” which are not “a futuristic venture.” The Grupo UB president stressed that the center’s inauguration “is not the end of the road,” adding that the goal is “to be able to multiply the size of these facilities tenfold in the near future.”
Simi Wang, Agibot’s sales director for Europe, said the inauguration of UB’s new training center, Agibot’s new strategic partner, “marks a new milestone in the expansion of intelligent robotics and embodied AI solutions in the Spanish market.” Agibot currently has 15,000 robots deployed since August, Wang said, making it “the fastest-growing company in the robotics sector.”
EUROPE’S FIRST TRAINING CENTER
Aragon’s vice president, Mar Vaquero, took part in Monday’s event. Although she said the facilities might initially look like “a film set from future movies,” they actually represent “the present that is already here.” She highlighted the fact that Aragon was chosen to host this training center, which “is not only the first in Spain, but also in Europe.”
For Vaquero, this “is not a coincidence,” but an opportunity to “showcase Aragon’s great potential as a technology hub capable of attracting major projects, as well as Europe’s technology hub that we are already presenting and have been working toward for some time.” This technological development, through projects such as the one presented on Monday, will allow the technology to be applied in different sectors, including healthcare, education and services.
For the vice president, this implementation must go hand in hand with ethics. “Ethics must always come before innovation, with human leadership linking us to prior knowledge of natural intelligence above all else.” The aim, she said, is to put artificial intelligence “at the service of society and human beings, and of the working and development capabilities these robots possess.”
