Dirk Thamm, who holds a degree in mechanical and production engineering, has made a name for himself as a robotics expert for many years. At Faude, a subsidiary of Kuka, he was most recently the managing director responsible for automation technology, as well as a cobot system integrator responsible for implementing application solutions with universal robots. Dirk Thamm started his professional career at Festo, where he headed the Handling - Robotics and Automation division, among others.

"Collaborative robotics will be a gamechanger for production in Germany," Thamm is certain. After all, he says, only automation can preserve local jobs. "However, automation plans often fail because of the cost of large robots and the lack of robot specialists," he adds, especially in small and medium-sized companies. This is where cobots come in useful, he says, because they can be put into operation in a day, even without robot specialists. That's why he's convinced: "In the next ten years, every company producing in Germany will have at least one robot."