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.

Industrial change demands a new kind of interaction between people, machines and data. In the future, operators and robots will work ever more closely together. This is why Festo has been working intensively on systems which, for example, can relieve people of monotonous or hazardous activities while at the same time posing no risk. Artificial intelligence plays a central role here. The BionicMobileAssistant is a prototype of a robot system that moves independently in three dimensions and can identify objects, grip adaptively and work together...

Grasping workpieces like a chameleon’s tongue – that’s the functional principle of Festo’s adaptive shape gripper DHEF. The gripper can thus pick, gather and place objects of many different shapes without any need for manual changeovers. This is why it won renowned distinctions in 2020 including the iF Design Award and the Red Dot Design Award.

Short product life cycles and a high diversity of variants are requirements brought about by industrial change. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that employees can rapidly and intuitively adapt to new tasks. This calls for new forms of collaboration between people, machinery and software. A key role is played here by self-learning systems with artificial intelligence and by robot-based automation solutions that can work hand in hand with the human operator and can form networks with each other. All these...