An option in the downturn: retrofit and robotics

A little shocked by the statement of the head of the laser specialist Trumpf, I wrote this post. Ms. Leibinger-Kammüller told the FAZ that her company is feeling a 10% drop in orders and that this is 25% in the industry. (Unfortunately, the "industry" is not specified. If it's just lasers and Trumpf as a stable anchor has reduced the decline, competitors would have to be more like minus 40%). Trumpf would no longer hire and would reduce investments, Leibinger-Kammüler said.

Particularly in manufacturing, the boom has offered the opportunity to make larger investments in order to kill two birds with one stone:

1. Full automation or a higher degree of automation. This is not only to save money, but also to reduce the shortage of skilled workers or to enable a night shift and thus additional capacities.
2. digitization, although there have already been interesting retrofit solutions in the field of sensor technology and recently production screens can also be read out by means of a camera in such a way that their data can be digitized without an interface. (Incidentally, the author has the best contacts to both start-ups in the field of sensor technology and the "screen reader").

In the downturn, a more favorable variant to full automation could be the increased use of cobots in cooperation with sensors/screen readers, which then support employees. This is all the more true as cobots increasingly become hybrid robots that can also drive. A cobot can then operate several stations.

In the video, a tool blank is placed in a measuring machine and measured. This does not have an interface. The question therefore arose as to how a digital twin could be created without costly large-scale investment. Solution: Read out the screen of the measuring machine, robot takes over handling of the blank and types the read-out data into the database. Doesn't sound like IoT, but it is.

The author of this blog is available for a walk through your production/manufacturing or also for market research(detail), in order to then make concrete suggestions for the use of cobots and other robots incl. funding opportunities. Both SMEs and large companies are visited. Among other things in Bavaria a 50% investment promotion is conceivable.