If Gunther Kegel wants to show the trends of tomorrow's industry today, he grabs his smartphone.

He lights up the screen, presses the photo app and scans the QR code from one of the parts of the conveyor belt in front of him.

The head of the Mannheim electronics specialist Pepperl+Fuchs pops up a table with information on his screen: name and function;

how big, how heavy and how old the part is, what specifications it has, where by whom and when it was manufactured, with which sensors and with which software it was equipped.

Stephen Finsterbusch

Editor in Business.

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A very special kind of data sheet – and it also has a very special name: administration shell.

The rather unwieldy-sounding term stands for something that is essential for the fourth stage of the industrial revolution: for transparency and standards.

Because if machines are to talk to machines via the so-called industrial Internet, they not only have to understand each other, they also have to know what they are actually supposed to be talking about.

And a digitized collection of data sheets is a good basis for this.

The revolution is here

Everything revolves around machines and systems, a lot about data acquisition and data processing.

"Digitization and automation are right at the top of the agenda for the entire industry," says Gunther Koschnick, a specialist in automation at the German Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (ZVEI).

Without a digital twin, practically nothing would be developed in the industry, no cars, no wind turbines, no assembly lines, says Rainer Brehm, a specialist in factory automation at Siemens, one of the three largest factory outfitters in the world.

"Many of what we see here at the trade fair didn't even exist five years ago," says Kegel from Pepperl+Fuchs, who is also President of the ZVEI.

The fourth industrial revolution, with its interconnectedness of everything and everyone, may be growing more slowly than was hoped ten years ago.

But it doesn't have to come first, "we're right in the middle of it," says Kegel.

And the SPS automation trade fair in Nuremberg is something like the hub around which everything revolves.

Therefore, the word administration shell, which seems somewhat bureaucratic, was on everyone's lips at the Nuremberg SPS over the past few days.

They talked about it at Siemens, at ABB and Keba, at Lenz, Weidmüller and Schaeffer.

Because at the stands of the corporations and medium-sized companies, a lot revolved around data and digital twins, around virtual worlds and factories, around the metaverse for industry and business.

The halls were well booked and well attended.

The industry rolls out its innovations.

Festo builds the new generation of cobots

The automation engineer Festo is showing a so-called cobot at the trade fair.

It comes in the form of a robotic arm, doesn't look too spectacular, but has it all.

Because he works with pneumatics.

In the words of Festo's IT and Digital Director Gerhard Borho, this is a world first for his type.

The cobot was developed for cooperation with a worker, can be used as a third hand in production and is particularly sensitive, flexible and safe thanks to the built-in sensors.

It is as long as a human arm, but much stronger.

He can twist and turn in all directions, making him more flexible than any arm.

He has a skin, but it's made of plastic.

This means that it barely weighs 25 kilograms, making it a lightweight in the world of robots.

According to Borho, Festo's new cobot does not require complex wiring, assembly or adjustment work, it should be graphically programmable and intuitive to use.

It will be on the market in 2023.

Weidmüller's operating system for machines

"We have put two major topics at the top of the trade fair agenda," says Volker Bibelhausen, spokesman for the board of the connection and electronics specialist Weidmüller.

The digitization of industry will connect and network millions of devices.

Against this background, the company presented robot-based connection technology for fiddly wiring processes at the Nuremberg trade fair.

It calls them snap-in technology.

It strips fine-wire conductors and clamps them deeply, firmly and securely into the connections as if by magic.

"On the other hand, we have a new software generation" - a Linux-based and cloud-capable program for automation beyond the respective company boundaries.

It's called u-OS and is a kind of operating system for machines, says Bibelhausen.

It contains open source and a wide range of standard technologies, allowing, among other things, the rapid collection, processing and forwarding of data directly on the machine.

It is easily expandable, has access to both Weidmüller's program landscape and that of partner networks - and for communication from machine to machine, for the emerging metaverse of the industry, a database like the one in the administration shell is needed.