Created: April 25th, 2022.

Current Long-Term Supported version is: Polyscope 5.12.5

To Our Valued Customers,

We are very happy and grateful to have you as our customer. Over the years, we have received great support and appreciation as you use our products in your daily operations. We always strive to deliver the best products that meet your expectations in terms of quality and reliability, and we are totally committed to fulfill your future needs and demands as well.

As you might be aware our industry has been confronted with both a significant shortage and a partial discontinuation of semiconductors. Despite these disruptions, Universal Robots (UR) has maintained an impressive lead time for delivery of products. While we have managed to continue shipping products during these challenging times, the current supply chain situation has reached a point where UR is required to change hardware components in our robots such as microcontrollers, which necessitate updates to the software as well. These hardware updates cause breaking compatibility changes as it no longer runs with the older versions of our software.

The first of such breaking hardware changes was introduced in Q1 2022 where the microcontroller in the e-Series robots’ joints was updated. Consequently, we released a Polyscope software version 5.11.9 that supports both the new and old hardware versions. Moreover, we expect to release further hardware updates to our products in the coming months as well. These hardware changes will be supported with new versions of Polyscope software (5.11.x).

While responding to the industry challenges and customer demands, we have also learned along the way and UR is pleased to announce its release strategy that includes the Polyscope software version 5.12 as the Long-Term-Support (LTS). The 5.12 LTS will be released in Q2 2022 and as long as it is maintained, it will support the old hardware, the current hardware and the future hardware updates that will come over time.

To keep you informed on further upcoming changes and provide visibility that allows you to plan for necessary actions on your side, please have a look at the hardware and software release roadmap below.

Please note that it is the major release of 5.12.X that will be long-term supported. The minor releases are continuously updated.

If you have any questions, please contact your local Universal Robots distributor or open a ticket on MyUR.