The goal of this project is to enable fine manipulation in very large workspaces, using robots that move on the rails. While industrial arms have high positioning accuracy, mobile robots benefit from a large infinite workspace. But how to combine them?

Scala is an innovative, low cost and very modular platform fully designed and developed in ISR-UC in Professor Tavakoli´s group. It is composed of modular instrumented rails with integrated linear encoders, modular mobile robots, and junctions, These junctions make these robots different from another type of rail robots. They allow the robots to move independently in a large horizontal or vertical mesh. It can be installed on the ceiling for factory automation or on a vertical mesh for warehouse automation. We have demonstrated various applications such as surveillance, Pick and Place on a large workspace, 3D printing, and 3D laser engraving.