More than forty specialists with responsibility for assembly in their companies took a day or two off from the hustle and bustle of Motek in Stuttgart to attend the Modern Assembly Congress. As the organizer, the handling editorial team had invited twelve speakers from the worlds of science and business to shed light on two main topics.

In most manufacturing processes, assembly is the station where the greatest added value is achieved. It is also an area that is still heavily characterized by manual work. This leaves room for technical innovations that allow partial or even complete automation of assembly processes. On the other hand, the worker still plays the decisive role in practice today: everything depends on the documented quality of their work.

Andreas Rüdenauer from R3DT and Timur Ucan from Siemens showed what modern system design and implementation can look like. R3DT uses virtual reality glasses to not only visualize assembly workstations long before practical implementation, but also to test for conceptual errors and work processes that are unergonomic for the worker. Siemens offers a far-reaching technology that uses a "digital twin" to test systems in advance to ensure that they function correctly. Marcel Nagel from Schunk explained how the digital twin can be used as part of a comprehensive digital engineering process. Kai Köhler presented DigitalZ, the Zimmer Group's Industry 4.0 solution. Dr Thorsten Sögding from Auvesy addressed an often overlooked aspect of digitalization: secure digital data storage, which on the one hand keeps unauthorized persons safely at a distance and at the same time provides authorized persons with reliable access to the right information when it is needed.

Humans as an advantage
The high level of interest in the topic of human-robot cooperation was demonstrated on the second day of the event. Dr. Georg Plasberg from Sick explained how the correct assessment of risks and potential damage can create a safer working environment for workers that is also more productive. Michael Schlaich from Schmalz showed current developments that safely relieve the strain on employees during handling. Michael Weinmann from Pilz presented an internal research project in which the integration of a cobot relieved workers of an unpopular, repetitive task and at the same time improved the quality of the result. Manuel Rösinger from Bott derived easy-to-understand solutions from his daily work practice in order to avoid typical problems in manual assembly by using the latest technologies and to improve the working environment for the workers. Plamen Kiradjiev, Global CTO Industry 4.0 at IBM, gave a very wide-ranging overview of how complex data mining technologies help ordinary assembly workers to easily find the right information in a jumble of sources.