This year, the Hannover Messe will be launched as a virtual trade fair under the motto “Industrial Transformation” – with the main topics of digitalisation, individualisation, climate protection and demography.
During the Festo TechTalk, four experts from Festo will answer how Festo supports its customers in this transformation. In focus: smart products that help companies to produce energy-efficiently, educational measures that empower employees for lifelong learning as well as for the digital working world, and the company’s Bionic Projects 2020.
This year’s speakers are Dr Frank Melzer, member of the management board (product and technology management), Dr Hans-Jörg Stotz, member of the management board (Festo Didactic SE), Karoline von Häfen, head of bionic projects, and Marcus Stemler, product manager of Festo Motion Terminal.
Digitalisation helps to save energy
Dr Frank Melzer will answer in the Festo TechTalk how people collect, visualise and evaluate data thanks to smart products. Marcus Stemler has a concrete example: he explains how the Festo Motion Terminal, Festo’s digital valve terminal, helps customers to reduce their energy consumption.
Know-how is the key to success
The smart products of Industrie 4.0 can only develop their full potential if the employees – also in the plants of our customers – are trained to apply them professionally. Dr Hans-Jörg Stotz explains the approach of Festo Didactic SE. He also has a few examples of digital educational measures in the field of energy efficiency: “With our CP Factory, we reproduce a real Industrie 4.0 production environment – apprentices, students and employees can learn in a practical way here”.
Festo Didactic SE even offers learning material for primary school children: “With our Bionics4Education learning construction kit, we are already getting even the youngest children worldwide excited about technical topics – I’m presenting the Bionic Flower for the first time in TechTalk,” he explains.
Bionic Learning Network: Autonomous and self-sufficient assistance system
Karoline von Häfen presents the BionicMobileAssistant, which moves autonomously in space and can independently recognise objects, grasp them adaptively and work on them together with humans. The processing of the acquired information is performed by a neural network that has been trained in advance using data augmentation. The mobile assistance system is modular and consists of three subsystems: a ballbot, an electric robot arm and the BionicSoftHand 2.0 – a pneumatic gripper inspired by the human hand. The animal kingdom served as a source of inspiration as well: as a second project, she is presenting the BionicSwift, an artificial bird that can fly as a flock in a defined airspace using a radio-based indoor GPS.
