A new year has arrived, and here in Canada, we have passed the middle of our winter season and started the slow climb out of the darkness towards the sunlight of springtime. Thinking about the projects we have planned for the R&D group here at Quanser in 2024, I wanted to take this opportunity as we begin the year to shed a little light on some of the projects that have been and remain in the dark for our friends and customers. 

Before I begin, I would like to take a moment to highlight our excellent new website that our friends in Marketing launched late last year. Browsing through our newly designed and refreshed online headquarters will provide a perfect starting point to navigate the areas of our product family that are top of mind for us in 2024 and beyond. 

With the website serving as our general lay of the land when it comes to our lab collections and solutions, let’s look into the darkness of our development lifecycle to see what’s coming later this year, just in time for warmer weather. 

To start the year, we hope to release our long-awaited QBot Platform. The QBot Platform will be an unrivalled mobile robot ideal for teaching mobile robotics, project-based learning, research and capstone projects. We’re very excited to share more details about the exciting capabilities and features we’ve built into the platform in the coming months. Our goal was to make a true platform capable of more diverse and interdisciplinary teaching and research applications than any system available today. From my perspective, the team knocked it out of the park, and I can’t wait to see how academics worldwide use it. 

As the year moves into the sunny summer months, we plan to turn our attention to the other aspect of our Mechatronics and Robotics lab collection with a set of products to change the game when it comes to teaching the fundamentals of mechatronic design and integration. If you’re a longtime Quanser fan, you’ll likely have some ideas as to what types of products we might have in store, but for now, the details will need to remain in the shade. Suffice it to say that we are very excited to build a collection of products that are aligned with my webinar on mechatronics concepts and pedagogy from back in 2021. 

Talking about our lab collections, a few years ago, when we released the Self-Driving Car Studio, I wrote about our approach to studios and our commitment to ensuring that our studios remain relevant and valuable for generations of researchers. Later this year we will be once again delivering on that promise, with more details and announcements to follow.  

Finally, when 2024 nears closing, we plan to have some exciting case studies to share, highlighting a journey we’ve already begun to uncover a new and groundbreaking potential lab collection that will bring together all of the advanced technologies we’ve developed over the past decade. But that’s a story for another day.