WELCOME TO INDUSTRY 5.0 The “human touch” revolution is now underway

By: Esben H. Østergaard, Founder and CTO, Universal Robots

At Hannover Messe 2017, like at industrial trade shows and in manufacturing industry publications around the world, the predominant theme was Industry 4.0. Although Industry 4.0 still has not scaled up to cover a significant percentage of manufacturing setups, its vision of near-total automation – and the promise of resulting cost savings – has clearly captured the industry’s imagination.

More importantly, even though the “lights out” factory is still a rare phenomenon, the connected automation technologies that form the backbone of Industry 4.0 are seeing widespread and growing deployment. And they are making important differences in the manufacture of many types of products and, in industries like healthcare, even the provision of services.