Fraunhofer Institute for Large Structures in Production Engineering IGP
Field of Work
In light of the growing shortage of skilled workers, the traditional goal of robot-assisted automation – maintaining and increasing companies’ competitiveness – has become more of a secondary aspect or even a positive side effect. The focus is increasingly shifting toward addressing the challenge of filling current and foreseeable gaps in the labor market. To meet this challenge, it is essential to leverage the expertise of skilled workers by automating monotonous, hazardous, or health-critical tasks and applying that know-how to significantly higher production volumes.
Industrial robotics offers the advantage of developing customized solutions based on standardized, commercially available components. In this context, software plays an equally important role alongside hardware, as the need for repeated manual programming of systems has become a significant cost driver. That’s why our experts focus on automated programming of the developed solutions. Such systems – developed by Fraunhofer IGP – are already successfully deployed in industry. Depending on the application, they are based, for example, on the analysis of 3D sensor data and do not require a connection to CAD/CAM systems.
In addition to the broad field of industrial robotics, the department also specializes in emerging technologies such as welding robotics and mobile robotics. These areas are gaining increasing importance in the context of rising competition for qualified personnel and the need to relieve existing workforces.
Through close collaboration with the institute’s wide range of technical departments, we are able to offer our customers comprehensive, integrated solutions from a single source.