University collaboration with business moving Lithuania up the value chain

Kaunas Technology University (KTU) has become an increasingly integral part of Lithuania’s corporate food chain. The largest technical university in the Baltic region, KTU is training and developing a substantial clutch of Lithuania’s future engineers and developers.

With about 10,000 students, KTU is the same size as Denmark’s Technical University (DTU). And whilst on a European scale it is not particularly large, KTU is carving out an impressive niche for itself as an incubation environment for innovative new businesses. The university has helped to produce and develop 45 start-up businesses in just the last three years.

Both Festo, a German industrial automation giant, and French energy management and automation company Schneider Electric have labs at KTU. The University also boasts two “mini Silicon Valleys.” Santaka Valley’s primary research areas are mechatronics, robotics, medical and material sciences, ultrasound and IT, whilst Nemunas Valley is home to specialists in the food industry.

To promote cooperation with the business community, KTU has established an online database of equipment and machinery that local companies can hire out for development tasks. It has also launched an e-science catalogue that lists over 100 services the university provides for the business community.

On the fifth floor of one of Santaka Valley’s state-of-the-art research facilities resides a company that exemplifies Lithuania’s climb up the value chain of European industry. Software developer Rubedo Systems is a system integrator that is trying to latch on to the booming market in technologies for mobile robot applications and drones.

Rubedo’s slogan is “‘We make robots behave.” In layman’s terms, using highly sophisticated control software solutions, they give robots eyes, ears and tactile senses which allow them to behave autonomously. Incidentally, this level of robotics could just as easily have come from a Danish development team. Rubedo Systems’ 20 employees work with a range of hardware such as stereo-optical sensors, vision technologies and NVIDIA multi-core technologies to develop their robotics solutions.

Read the article at ing.dk