Festo is an independent family-owned company and a global player in automation technology and technical education, with headquarters in Esslingen a.N. (Germany) – with over 20,000 employees at around 250 locations worldwide, a turnover of around 3.5 billion euros and an R&D rate of over 8%. As a partner in motion, Festo offers integrated and seamless pneumatic, electric and digital drive technologies across all industries – including ...

The growing pace of technological change, political disputes over trade relations and increasingly dismal prospects for the global economy are putting the manufacturing industry under pressure. The corona pandemic was and is a particular challenge, too. How can we succeed in not simply going with the flow but playing an active role in this complex scenario, especially as a medium-sized family company?

Highly flexible and modular production plants with decentralised automation enable the process industry to react to fluctuations in demand. This is the case in water treatment, in the pharmaceutical, fine chemical and food industries and also in energy generation. Decentralised controllers from Festo are perfect for this. Festo developed the PA-Toolkit for programming these controllers to enable simple application engineering in line with the ...

Thanks to radio-based indoor GPS with ultra-wideband technology (UWB) the BionicSwifts can fly safely and in a coordinated pattern in a defined airspace. To execute these flight manoeuvres as true to life as possible, the wings are modelled on the plumage of real birds. The agility of the artificial birds is not just due to their lightweight design and aerodynamic kinematics, but also to the use of function integration.