Design News - Blog - When Manufacturing Becomes a Video Game

If the industrial world wants to lure millennial grads to the manufacturing floor, maybe they should tell the grads the factory has become a video game. In his session at the ATX Automation Technology Conference in Minneapolis on Sept. 21, Tom Geiger, head of electric automation, Americas at Festo, will explore the boundaries of automation. He--ll describe a not-too-distant future of robotics and machine learning spun together like a virtual reality game. Geiger--s session, Working Smarter, Not Harder: Human Collaboration with Robotics and Automation, will look at science-fiction-like issues such as moving from machine learning to cognitive computing that will enable robotics and automation to make creative decisions in case of planned or unplanned changes. Geiger envisions a plant where machines can order their own supplies when needed, eliminate repetitive tasks, enlarge manufacturing capacity, and provide faster output -- all by themselves. Geiger explains the plant he envisions would be operated much like a video game, where the operators move machine data around on a computer screen and the equipment on the floor responds.