Industrial Automation

The demands on manufacturing companies are increasing, necessitating flexible production processes; the solution lies in automating production. KUKA, one of the leading industrial automation companies, can help you to address both present-day and future challenges in the real-world, with optimal industrial automation solutions.

Greater requirements on production for manufacturers

Global competition and digital transformation increase the requirements of manufacturing companies enormously. While new products, technologies, and variations are appearing on the market with ever greater frequency, customer expectations on the production of goods are increasingly being influenced by the effortless comparison of offers via the Internet.

In order to meet these expectations, manufacturers must ensure great product variety against a backdrop of fluctuating batch sizes. Adding further to this pressure are other factors, such as a shortage of skilled labor, rising wage costs and stringent health and safety requirements. Manufacturing-facilities thus require flexible production systems, the key to which lies in automating production.

Automation means improving the production process by means of machinery and state-of-the-art technologies. As a specialist in the field of automating robotics in production, KUKA enables you to meet the more exacting requirements in terms of speed, flexibility, efficiency, productivity and added value.

As an industrial automation company, KUKA is your one-stop-shop: from a single robotic arm to production cells, all the way to tunrkey production plants and connected production thanks to cloud-based IT tools.

Industrial robots for factory automation

Androids adapted to meet individual customer requirements are the basis for industrially automating your manufacturing facility. KUKA offers industrial robots with all payload capacities, reaches, versions, software and variants for your factory automation.
Discover our portfolio of industrial robots
Production systems

You want to automate your entire production system? KUKA designs, plans and implements efficient system solutions for various automated manufacturing processes and sectors.
Find the right production system for your automation project
Automated manufacturing cells

Specific production requirements demand specific manufacturing cells. KUKA offers intelligent, process- and customer-oriented cells – as individual as possible, as standardized as necessary.
Find out more about KUKA advanced manufacturing cells
Powerful control technology with KUKA Robot Controllers

High quality robots and production systems require high quality controllers. The PC-based software architecture of our controllers allow for exact tailoring of the specific needs of your manufacturing factory. Thanks to various expansion options, the controllers can be optimized to changing production lines, or entirely new production tasks.
Find out more about KUKA Robot Controllers
Software for automating production

From routine sequences to dynamically varying production processes: computer-integrated engineering and smart software additionally supports and optimizes the automation of your production.
Support your production processes with the appropriate software

Linking the real and virtual worlds of industrial production

KUKA supplements its own know-how through investments in start-up companies, such as Device Insight.

The Munich-based company specializes in IoT platforms for networked production systems. It optimally complements KUKA’s expertise, establishing a comprehensive portfolio of products and services in the field of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Custom industry solutions

Products and software from KUKA are to be found in numerous sectors, such as the automotive industry, the electronics industry and the metal industry. Take a look at our success stories to gain an impression of our industrial automation systems and find out how you can benefit from our expertise, to successfully rise to the challenges posed by the digital transformation using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Custom industry solutions within the electronics sector: automation with a sensitive touch

The electronics sector is a classic example of an industry that can benefit enormously from robotic application. Product life cycles are becoming perceptibly shorter – the must-have items of today are the non-sellers of tomorrow. At the same time, wage costs and quality requirements are rising in almost all countries.

New automation concepts with human-robot collaboration

With human-robot collaboration (HRC) and cobots, implementing robots is made much faster and easier, and an entirely new form of intelligent automation is possible with humans and machines working hand in hand. While humans control and monitor production, cobots, such as the LBR iiwa and LBR iisy*, perform unpleasant and non-ergonomic tasks. Thanks to their sensitive capabilities, manufacturing automation has been an essential part as robots can work in the immediate vicinity of the human operator and perform production steps with them hand in hand.

_{*The LBR iisy is available in the iiQKA Pre-Launch Package for a small number of customers starting at the end of 2021 and scaling in availability during 2022. Please check our iiQKA – Robots for the People page for more information.}

In this way, companies can meet their health and safety requirements and employees can be used to perform tasks that call for human strengths, such as the ability to learn, monitoring and sensory perception or creativity.

In sensitive assembly, the LBR iiwa and the worker work hand in hand — Working hand in hand: human-robot collaboration opens up entirely new automation concepts.

Taking automation a step further: "industrial intelligence 4.0_beyond automation"

The increasing automation of production and the cooperative networking of human workers and machines are set to change the world of work and robotics fundamentally. Even in the factory of the future, however, the focus will still be on humans. Robots will not replace humans, but complement their abilities. Various robotics related and new occupations will come into being, particularly at the interface between mechanical engineering and IT.

KUKA stands for Industrie 4.0 made in Germany. With the slogan "iintelligence 4.0_beyond automation", our goal is to establish smart automation solutions globally in different industries and to pursue their further development. Together with our customers, for example, we want to take the opportunity to support valuable manpower with machinery, secure jobs by means of higher productivity and achieve greater efficiency and flexibility in production.