Artificial intelligence is making robots smarter, safer and faster to deploy.
Alongside these technological advances, end-users’ attitudes towards return on investment are shifting. Rather than focusing solely on upfront purchase price, manufacturers are increasingly considering total cost of ownership( TCO), factoring in long-term considerations such as maintenance, downtime and energy consumption when making a purchasing decision.
As a result, automation solutions are becoming more flexible, affordable and user-friendly than ever. These smart and scalable systems are set to help more manufacturers overcome labour shortages, enhance product quality and consistency, and drive meaningful gains in productivity.
3. Open ecosystems and partnerships
The future of industrial automation is collaborative. Open platforms and partnerships between hardware and software providers are enabling more flexible, integrated solutions that accelerate innovation and adoption.
With AI-driven voice control, robots can interpret spoken instructions and autonomously generate the code needed to execute tasks.
At FANUC, we are actively collaborating with leading technology partners bringing AI solutions to market, including NVIDIA, helping to unlock the potential of physical AI. A key step in this journey is our support for the open-source robotics platform ROS 2, which enables programming via Python. By lowering the barrier to entry, this allows developers, researchers and companies to build AI-driven robotics applications on FANUC’ s proven industrial hardware.
One important benefit of this openness is a smoother transition from education into industry. ROS 2 and Python are widely taught in colleges and universities, and making these tools available on industrial equipment will allow more young engineers to apply familiar skills directly in real-world manufacturing and automation environments.
More broadly, open platforms such as ROS 2 and Python will help to stimulate a new wave of innovation, enabling companies to build, customise and scale AI-augmented robotics solutions while leveraging their own software expertise on top of FANUC’ s hardware and NVIDIA’ s advanced simulation infrastructure.
Join FANUC for‘ The Future of Precision Engineering’ to discover the automation innovations set to shape UK manufacturing( 27-29 January 2026, FANUC UK, Ansty Park, Coventry).
Register today at https:// ukopenhouse. fanuc. eu /# whats-on
Issue 79 PECM 51