The innovation partnership between Festo and Würth has already lasted two years, and the first phase of the partnership is now coming to an end – with success: the prototype works. Würth wants to comprehensively test Festo's tailor-made AI software solution at the Reinhold Würth Innovation Center Curio, discuss it with employees and, if everything proves successful, implement it in its logistics centers worldwide.

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.

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,...