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From collaborative robots to colleague robots: Harting to showcase ‘industrial intelligence with instinct’ at Hannover Messe

Previously responsible for the rough, collaborative robots – or “cobots” – will take on more and more activities in the future, side by side with humans, says Harting, one of the leading industrial automation companies in the world.

In cooperation with customers and partners, Harting will showcase various scenarios and technologies “with a fine hand” at the Hannover Messe event.

As part of one demonstration, a robotic cell in which a Kuka collaborative robot writes “For Luke from Papa” on a little yellow box. 

Shortly before, the Kuka lightweight robot put the white Siku car – a toy – with the Harting imprint there.

At this point, another Kuka robot drives it – past the trade fair visitor – to the next production cell, where the second vehicle is already waiting for Lukas.

The order was placed by Papa in the specially designed web configurator the day before and triggered the order at the Hannover Messe at the Harting stand (Hall 11 / C15) via a QR code on his mobile phone.

Harting’s Smart Factory “HAII4You” demonstrates the fully vertical integration from the customer to the flexible production of a product, divided into self-contained, yet fully networked production cells.

The activities in each manufacturing cell are carried out by a collaborative Kuka lightweight robot. The goods are transported between the cells via a mobile Kuka iiwa robot.

In addition, PerFact Innovation, a partner company in Mica.network, has created digital twins of the system and robots.

This generates a digital image of production processes, with the help of which remote maintenance and condition monitoring are visualized and simplified.

The company Expleo reads the power moments of the robotic grippers to detect signs of wear.

To do this, the data in the Microsoft Azure Cloud is evaluated and compared with historical data.

The system at the Harting stand thus demonstrates the entire range of modern production methods and connectivity in the sense of the trade fair theme Integrated Industry – Industrial Intelligence.

Swedish start-up builds the next-generation assembly workstation

A workplace for the intelligent, collaborative assembly of small parts is the business model of MTEK.

The young company from Sweden is showing an assembly workstation with a collaborating robot at the Harting stand.

The two-armed ABB robot can detect and grasp small objects and is used for assembly and handicraft activities side by side with people.

MTEK’s business model is software as a service for process execution and control.

On the subject of the cooperation with the Swedes, Olaf Wilmsmeier, business development manager RFID at Harting, says: “Mica and RFID make the assembly workstation and the process flow into an integrated unit with complete traceability.”

Wilmsmeier supported MTEK in the integration of Harting’s UHF RFID technology and already knows the company from the Nokia “Factory in a Box” joint project, which was one of the audience highlights at Hannover Messe 2018.