Sheridan College's manufacturing school just upped its game with the acquisition of a small parts assembly robot named YuMi.

Unveiled Monday morning at the school's Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and Design Technologies (CAMDT) in Brampton, the machine is intended to work alongside manual labourers while doing tasks such as putting microprocessors in circuit boards and assembling push buttons.

"Anything that is very light and very tedious – the accuracy on this is very high," said Casey DiBattista, general manager of Brampton robotics company ABB Canada, of the kind of work the machine can do while bolted to a table on an assembly line.

Designed at ABB branches in Sweden and Switzerland, YuMi is known as a collaborative robot and is safe to work closely beside people, he said.

Nick McDonald, ABB business development manager, explained at the event that safety features of the machine include padded arms, sensors that cause the machine to shut down if a person comes into contact with it and it's also designed with no "pinch points" for a co-worker to get their hands stuck.

He said programming of the device is also easy where a worker can simply take hold of the machine's arms and guide it through a task and then "hit play."

"This is a major gain for advanced manufacturing – particularly human-robot interaction," Sheridan president Jeff Zabudsky said of YuMi.

"The addition of YuMi to our suite of robotics capabilities is particularly exciting as CAMDT begins to explore a new area of research: the application of additive manufacturing and robotics for the health and biomedical industries."

The college is the first post-secondary school in Canada to have a YuMi and ABB has only sold three in Canada since the machine was released about a year ago. The robot is manufactured at an ABB plant in China.

YuMi's presence at the Davis campus is part of an ongoing partnership between CAMDT and the company that includes an ABB robotics lab at the school.