This year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas featured a UR10 cobot in a show-stopping demo that highlights the robot’s creative capabilities. The demo was developed by innovation studio Deeplocal to help launch National Geographics’ new “Genius” TV series based on the life of Albert Einstein. People were invited to tweet a photo of themselves to a UR10 robot set up in front of a digital chalkboard. Using Einstein’s own handwriting, the cobot quickly began writing the inventor’s equations on the chalkboard, in seemingly random locations. It was only on stepping back from the chalkboard that the person’s portrait—made up entirely of equations—became clear. (Watch the UR10 channel science and art in this SXSW video report from Adweek.) The robot’s speed and accuracy—as well as sophisticated programming capabilities—made the demo possible.

"This project was created in just 3 weeks,” said Kevyn McPhail, roboticist and integration engineer with Deeplocal in Pennsylvania, who was commissioned by National Geographic to create the demo. “We really liked working with the UR robot. It was an incredibly fast process." Deeplocal—which describes itself as “kind of like an advertising agency, but with aerospace engineers, a CNC router, table saws, and a lot of background noise on our conference calls”—started out loaning a UR3 robot, but quickly decided to purchase its own UR10.

In developing this cutting-edge demo, Deeplocal also received invaluable tech support from Universal Robot’s Tom Moolayil in the New York office. “The UR team really helped us push the application in ways it had not been pushed before,” said McPhail, who is now contemplating future UR robot projects.