Pro2Future - Products and Production systems of the future

By Birgit Baustädter At the beginning of April, the COMET competence centre Pro²Future was established and shared between Linz and Graz. It will conduct research on products and production systems of the future. The key question is: what comes after Industry 4. Eight TU Graz-institutes of the In the future, machines should be able to recognise when humans and other machines are moving about in the room and adapt their work accordingly. By means of Augmented Reality, the next steps in the production process as well as in maintenance should be communicated to the employees to facilitate, for example, much cheaper and shorter maintenance and repair work. Not only should humans learn to handle the new systems, but the machines should also recognise independently how to interact with their environment. "We work on 'man-machine interaction' and 'collaborative robotics'.