March 2025 www.drivesncontrols.com 8 Hannover Messe 2025 Hannover, Germany 31 March – 4 April, 2025 The main exhibition areas for the 2025 industrial megashow will be Smart Manufacturing, Digital Ecosystems, Energy for Industry, Compressed Air & Vacuum Technology, Engineered Parts & Solutions, Future Hub and International Trade & Investment. Drive and uid power technologies will be highlighted in the Motion & Drives areas. The conference programme will include around 1,600 speakers. The partner country for 2025 is Canada. www.hannovermesse.de/en Sensor+Test 2025 Nuremberg, Germany 6–8 May, 2025 The show describes itself as “the leading international trade fair for sensor, measuring and testing technology”. Its organisers say it is “in demand like never before because we oer exhibitors a platform where they are not only seen, but also appreciated.” In 2024, 383 companies from 29 countries took part. There will be areas focusing on condition monitoring and calibration. www.sensor-test.de/en CWIEME Berlin 2025 Berlin, Germany 3-5 June, 2025 The exhibition for the coil winding, electric motor, transformer and generator industries, returns to its Berlin venue and is expected to attract more than 550 exhibitors and around 6,500 visitors. Last year’s Start-Up Zone brought together edgling companies and their latest technologies. This year’s Innovation Zone will expand on this and provide a platform for cuttingedge technologies, including AI and machine learning, predictive maintenance and monitoring, IoTenabled tools, smart sensors and data analytics. https://berlin.cwiemeevents.com/home Smart Manufacturing Week 4–5 June, 2025 NEC, Birmingham More than 450 exhibitors and 13,500 visitors are expected at the two-day event that includes the Drives & Controls show, Smart Factory Expo, Maintec, the Air-Tech exhibition, Fluid Power & Systems and the Design+Engineering Expo. Running concurrently are the Manufacturing Digitalisation Summit, the Industrial Data and AI Summit, and the Automation & Robotics Accelerator Symposium. www.smartmanufacturingweek.com 2025 OT Cybersecurity Summit 17-19 June, 2025 Brussels, Belgium This event, organised by ISA, will focus on strategic OT (operational technology) cybersecurity based on the ISA/IEC 63443 standards. It will include various technical tracks, training courses as well as a cyberescape room. https://otcs.isa.org n NEWS Alan Conn has been appointed managing director of ABB Robotics for the UK and Ireland. He is moving from ABB’s automation subsidiary, B&R Industrial Automation, where he has been for almost nine years, initially as MD for the UK and Ireland and, for the past two years, as regional MD for Northern and Eastern Europe. Earlier in his career he worked at Bosch Rexroth, HMK and THK. Trio Motion Technology has appointed Neil Moss as its sales manager for the UK and Ireland. He will support OEM machine-builders, systems integrators, and distributors for Trio’s machine, motion and robotics controls. Moss has had a 30-year career in motion control, including periods at BPX Electro Mechanical, Olsen Actuators, Iconsys, ABB Motion Products, Baldor and Bosch Rexroth’s Indramat division. A UK-BASED AI AND ROBOTICS start-up is aiming to develop the world’s leading, commercially scalable, and safe humanoid robots. London-based Humanoid (also known as SKL Robotics), founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneur Artem Sokolov, plans to develop and test prototypes for two platforms – wheeled and bipedal – later this year. “We’re also in ongoing discussions with leading retail companies for potential pilot projects,” Sokolov notes. The company’s 175cm-tall HMND 01 humanoid weighs 70kg and has 41 degrees of freedom. It has a walking speed of 1.5 m/s (5.4 km/h), a payload capacity of up to 15kg, and an average runtime of four hours. The company says it can achieve humanlevel or faster manipulation speeds for complex tasks, and can navigate confined spaces with “exceptional” accuracy. The robot’s hardware and software are modular. Customers will be able to combine different upper-body, lower-body and end-effector configurations to suit their application, and cut costs by eliminating non-essential hardware and software. There will be choice of interchangeable “garments” to protect both the robot and its environment. These garments will also allow the robot to take on different identities tailored to the application. The robots will incorporate high-torque, high-speed actuators, and use AI for environment perception and object manipulation. The company reports it is also developing model- and learning-based locomotion and whole-body control technologies. Humanoid says that its general-purpose robots will oer a low TCO (total cost of ownership) and be designed for mass commercialisation. They will be suitable for a variety of applications, including industrial roles such as goods handling, picking and packing, kitting and parts-handling. They could be used in retail and manufacturing sites, logistics and fullment centres, and warehouses. Humanoid is entering an increasingly competitive, but potentially lucrative, market. ABI Research predicts that the global market for humanoid robots will achieve a CAGR of 95% between 2022 and 2030, when it will be worth $6.5bn. Annual shipments could reach 1,000 robots this year and 182,000 by 2030. There are at least a dozen developers working on humanoid robots around the world, including Tesla, Figure AI, Boston Dynamics and several Chinese companies. The US developer, Apptronik, recently raised $350m from investors that include Google (see page 11), and Apple is reported to be working on humanoid technologies. https://thehumanoid.ai UK start-up says its modular humanoid robot will cut costs Humanoid plans to oer wheeled as well as bipedal robots
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