SPS 2022: A focus on connections, both technical and interpersonal

After a three year wait, the time finally arrived on November 8: at sps 2022 in Nuremberg, the automation and drive technology industry presented a whole host of technical innovations—while celebrating the start of the holiday season. Our exhibition was themed “Experience Connectivity.”

Experience Connectivity—a fitting headline for ours SPS booth in multiple respects: not only did we focus on connections, communication and interfaces between components and systems, but also between people. Despite there being fewer exhibitors overall, the number of visitors at our booth was only slightly lower than in 2019—a clear sign that many people missed the in-person interactions. They visited our booth in hall 7 to find comprehensive automation, drive and control solutions from a single source—from the process level, to interfaces and controls, to application-specific drive technology and robot-based applications.

The focus was on our newly developed i³ CONTROL automation platform. The special thing about this ecosystem: it provides a technically coordinated total solution for industry-specific controllers—including everything from engineering software and controller hardware to integrated chip technology. And it has the potential to do so much more. The first products in the i³ CONTROL portfolio—which is expected to grow steadily in the future—were officially launched at the trade fair: in particular, the associated software environment, i³ Engineer, and first machine controller for this new platform, the iC9200 series, had their world premiere.

Other trade fair innovations included the new CR700 inverters for crane and the LA500 drives for lift applications, the new multi-protocol card for current Yaskawa inverters, the new EcoSystem portfolio of cobot solutions, and the new version of the Singular Control solution, which allows combined control of robots, servodrives, inverter drives and I/Os from a single controller.