Universal Robots (UR), whose UK headquarters are located in Sheffield, has unveiled the UR AI Trainer at GTC 2026 in Silicon Valley.
Developed in collaboration with Scale AI, the AI Trainer marks a tectonic shift as robots move from pre-programmed applications to fully AI-driven tasks. These systems are powered by robust data generated in AI training cells where robots imitate humans.
“Our customers, ranging from large enterprises to AI research labs, are no longer just asking for AI features,” said Anders Beck, VP of AI Robotics Products at Universal Robots. “They need a way to collect high-fidelity, synchronised robot and vision data to train AI models on the same robots they intend to deploy. Our AI Trainer is the industry’s first direct lab-to-factory solution for AI model training.”
The AI Trainer allows human operators to guide UR robots through tasks in a leader-follower setup while automatically capturing high-quality multimodal data for robotics AI development. Operators physically guide a “leader” robot through a task while a synchronized “follower” robot mirrors the motion in real time. During each demonstration, the system records synchronized motion, force, and visual data, producing the structured datasets required to train Vision-Language-Action (VLA).
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Deploying on UR’s AI Accelerator platform, the UR AI Trainer combines UR robots with Scale AI software to enable data capture on UR robots in production and at scale creating continuous feedback that drives ongoing optimization of physical AI systems.
“Universal Robots is a leader in industrial robotics, and its global footprint offers the ideal foundation for data capture and AI deployment foundation modeling at scale,” said Ben Levin, General Manager, Physical AI at Scale AI.
“Together, we’ve created an integrated robotics data flywheel, allowing customers to train, deploy, and improve their AI models faster than ever before.” As part of this collaboration, UR and Scale AI will release a large-scale industrial task dataset collected on UR robots later this year.
With GTC as the official launch pad, attendees have been able to experience the system first-hand at UR’s booth as they guided two UR3e ‘leader’ robots providing haptic input to control two UR7e ‘follower’ robots. The setup enabled visitors to perform an advanced smartphone packaging task with haptic feedback for imitation learning and VLA training, with demonstration data recorded in real time on Scale’s stack and replayable directly on the AI Trainer.
The process of capturing robot training data for AI models is further showcased through a demo that illustrates the same smartphone packaging task – just trained virtually: Built in NVIDIA Omniverse and leveraging Isaac Sim, the simulated setup allows attendees to control a virtual bi-manual UR3e system with real-time haptic feedback using two Haply Inverse3 devices as ‘leaders’, providing a physics-accurate simulation.
Universal Robots is also exploring the use of the NVIDIA Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint to automate and scale its synthetic data generation, transforming world-scale compute into a production engine for high-quality robotic training data.
“The shift toward Physical AI requires a fundamental move from rigid, pre-programmed automation to generalist robots that can perceive, reason, and learn through human-like interaction,” said Amit Goel, head of robotics and edge AI ecosystem at NVIDIA.
“By leveraging the NVIDIA Isaac simulation frameworks, Universal Robots is building a scalable engine for high-fidelity data capture and generation, providing the essential infrastructure to train the next generation of autonomous systems at scale.”
