Europe's largest center of excellence for artificial intelligence and modern robotics, Cyber Valley, has gained a new Corporate Network partner in Festo. In the year of its 100th anniversary, one of the leading manufacturer of automation technology is taking the next step in bringing modern AI technologies into industrial practice. Cyber Valley offers a platform for scientists and companies to deepen basic research in machine learning, intelligent systems and robotics.

The FLAIROP (Federated Learning for Robot Picking) research project, which was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, was concluded at Festo in Esslingen-Berkheim. At the event, all project participants – as well as interested public – were on site or presented their results live from Canada.

The future belongs to human-robot cooperation. System builder BEC developed such a collaborative solution for Siemens Healthineers. It inserts coils weighing several tonnes precisely into the magnets of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. Electric cylinders from Festo, which ensure the coils are securely gripped, play a crucial role here.  

Production, warehouse, shipping - where goods are produced, stored, sorted or packed, picking also takes place. This means that several individual goods are removed from storage units such as boxes or cartons and reassembled. With the FLAIROP (Federated Learning for Robot Picking) project Festo and researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), together with partners from Canada, want to make picking robots smarter using distributed AI methods. To do this, they are investigating how to use training data from multiple stations,...