PAL Robotics brings TIAGo Pro to mobile manipulation research

PAL Robotics introduced TIAGo Pro on May 19, 2023, presenting the robot as the next step in its TIAGo mobile-manipulation line. The Barcelona company described the platform around fully torque-controlled arms, upgraded electronics, higher-bandwidth communication and improved human-robot interaction features, with target research areas including agile manufacturing, Industry 5.0 and future healthcare work.

The Company

PAL Robotics had been building service, humanoid and research robots for almost two decades before TIAGo Pro. The original TIAGo was introduced in 2015 as a mobile research platform with a sensorized pan-tilt head, lifting torso and 7-DoF arm, plus plug-and-play end effectors including a parallel gripper or a five-fingered humanoid hand. PAL positioned it for perception, manipulation and interaction research, with ROS support and configurable hardware for labs working across assisted living, light industry, navigation, grasping and HRI.

The TIAGo line expanded before the Pro launch. TIAGo++ added bimanual manipulation with two 7-DoF arms while staying ROS-based and customizable, and TIAGo OMNI++ added an omnidirectional mecanum-wheel base, interchangeable end effectors, 360-degree LiDAR and a screen. Those earlier variants made TIAGo Pro part of a longer platform family rather than a standalone robot concept.

The Platform

TIAGo Pro’s main hardware change was arm control. PAL described fully torque-controlled arms at joint level, brakes at each joint, a 1 kHz EtherCAT bus, custom electronics and added compute for machine-learning-based algorithms. The arms kept a 7-DoF structure, used series elastic elements for sequential joint torque sensing and were mounted to improve shared workspace between the arms, including frontal, lateral, floor and shelf reach.

The HRI layer stayed central to the platform. PAL listed facial expression, gaze control, face identification, skeleton tracking and offline speech recognition in more than 20 languages among TIAGo Pro’s interaction capabilities. The robot combined those features with a mobile manipulation stack aimed at research into grasping, teaching by demonstration, collaborative tasks and contact-aware work around people.

The Launch

PAL Robotics brought TIAGo Pro to ICRA 2023 alongside other systems from its portfolio, including Kangaroo, ARI, TIAGo and ARan. External conference coverage described the platform as a new mobile manipulator for agile manufacturing, Industry 5.0 and healthcare research, while PAL’s ICRA recap said TIAGo Pro Edition was displayed with its torque-controllable arms and HRI capabilities.

The ICRA presence also showed how PAL was positioning the broader TIAGo family. At the same event, the standard TIAGo demonstrated grasping, table-object picking, Motion Builder for live motion recording and Visual Programming for visitors. TIAGo Pro extended that research line toward stronger arm control and richer interaction without dropping the configurable platform structure that had defined TIAGo since its first release.

Maturity

TIAGo Pro launched as a research and applied-development platform, with PAL saying EU collaborative projects in agrifood and manufacturing would be early adopters of the new hardware features. The company did not frame the May 2023 announcement as a customer deployment or commercial rollout, but as a platform upgrade for labs and applied robotics teams working on mobile manipulation, HRI and collaborative robotics.

The launch moved TIAGo from a configurable mobile-manipulation family toward higher-control physical interaction. TIAGo had already covered navigation, perception, grasping and HRI across multiple hardware variants; TIAGo Pro added torque control, EtherCAT communication, upgraded electronics and new arm placement for work that needed finer contact behavior and a larger usable manipulation workspace.

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