Development Trends in Cost Oriented Production Automation

The field of manufacturing automation is one of the fastest growing in technology not only because of the rapid developments of IT hard- and software as well as micro-, nano- and femtotechnologies for the development of new materials. Therefore in production automation we have the new headlines new materials, smart products, smart factories, Internet of things (IoT), production 4.0. This requires Multi Robot Systems or Multi Agent Systems (MAS) consisting of cooperative industrial, mobile and probably in the future humanoid intelligent robots acting as a team for solving common tasks. In addition they have to be cooperative. The tasks of the robots must perform the mechanism of cooperation and the system performance. Production 4.0 requires the replacement of the Central Control Computer by a distributed, networked Computer System. From the side of Automation in this paper the latest trends in manufacturing automation will be presented. Concerning the problems of SME's to introduce Production 4.0 first ideas on "Cost Oriented Production 4.0 Production 4.5" will be discussed. From the side of TECIS both disciplines will raise some new social and ethical questions related to humans (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.