Das Institut für Fördertechnik und Logistiksysteme (IFL) am Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) leitet die Sitzungen des Kernteams von VDA und VDMA, unterstützt bei der Gestaltung neuer Features und betreut das zugehörige GitHub für die Kommunikationsschnittstelle VDA 5050.
Auf dem AGV MeshUp in Dortmund hat sich der Institutsleiter Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Furmans von der Praxistauglichkeit der VDA 5050 für die Steuerung einer gemischten Flotte mobiler Roboter überzeugen können. Im Interview erläutert er, wie sich die VDA 5050 entwickelt hat und warum es aus seiner Sicht solche offenen Schnittstellenstandards in der Intralogistik braucht.
The original idea was a cool collaboration between users, namely the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) and the potential suppliers from the VDMA. The agreement to jointly develop such a standard, or not yet a standard, such a design guideline - together from suppliers and potential customers - that was the origin of the success. The second, I think, was that we had a good setting with software-related things and this is probably the first guideline that is actually available on GitHub. Not just a paper thing, but actually digital for digital natives with proper version management.
And I believe that this young team that did this back then and that we were allowed to moderate was the origin of the success and that they were people with software savvy. It was also one of the first guidelines that was really driven from the software corner and was not hardware-dominated. That's why it was good and it was also a good success that it was possible to develop it during the coronavirus period. That also shows how great the commitment was and how great the need was for everyone involved to do this.
Question: Where do you see VDA 5050 in the market?
The VDA 5050 is a good fit for us because we tend to be more of an association for SMEs, i.e. the customers, not the car manufacturers, but the VDMA already represents SMEs. I know the SME sector well, also from my own experience, and that's why it's important to work together. Because I used to be on the user side when I was still in industry and you just don't like to buy something and then produce a login situation afterwards. So the supplier likes it, but the buyer doesn't and what we have seen is that the market for AMR or AGVs has not developed, not because they are not needed, but because everyone was afraid of the login situation. The second thing is that you can take a best-of-breed approach. We have a lot of medium-sized companies that produce very different AGV systems with different capabilities. Maybe one is good at pallet transport, the other is good at boxing and the third does freewheeling and the like. And when I invest now, I don't want to decide at the beginning which technology I want and I can invest in this way and later have a best-of-breed, i.e. I can pick out the best that is available for a later application, bring it together and that enables us to work together as an ecosystem. Of course, we have a few large providers such as Jungheinrich, STILL etc.. But on the whole, the AGV sector is very much dominated by SMEs and that's how a market is created. The third thing is that it's also good for the providers, because otherwise you need software developers who don't want to write the same code every time to produce similar interfaces. It doesn't really add any value either. And I believe that we have achieved VDA 5050 is also a typically German and European story, because we have managed to overcome the language barriers and talk to each other. And I believe that the world also needs this and that we are at the forefront when it comes to further development.
Question: Why is there currently such a great need for automation?
Automation, as you can see in the current economic situation, is still a great market and I believe this is because we have demographic problems, not just in Germany and Central Europe, even the Indians now have this type of demographic. So automation will be necessary to keep societies running properly. But what we need is to make it easier. We also started with very simple things in the directive, which means you actually have to do a lot of engineering work in advance to structure your processes and only then can you automate them. If we look at the big companies in the automotive industry, it's not a problem for them, they build hundreds of thousands of new cars and have to automate them anyway.
I see a huge opportunity for growth in small and medium-sized companies, and by medium-sized I mean with just a few thousand employees, but they are more niche providers and specialists, especially in Europe, and for them it is important that something can be put into operation quickly. That's why we need to develop in a direction where content is understood, so to speak, that we don't just have a technical interface, but how we would work together as people. For example: you could hand over a bread roll and say: here's a bread roll. Transferring this to classic automation technology would be complex: we would measure the distance, analyse light refuelling and then derive something from the result. But we have to get to the point where it simply says: Bring the bread roll or the pallet from A to B, that's where we have to go. I think VDA 5050 shows a bit of what is possible.
And there are still incredibly large markets at this level. The lion's share of jobs in Germany and Europe are in small and medium-sized companies, and if we manage to get them interested in automation technology or make them automatable, we will have achieved a lot.
