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Even great ideas are often hidden behind unimaginative names. The Schunk company, for example, which, like many long-established medium-sized companies, is simply called the same as its owners, has not called its latest invention “Magic Fingers” or “Robohand”, but simply “2D Grasping Kit”. This fits with the understatement of the company from Lauffen am Neckar, which produces a variety of grippers for industry with its 3,700 employees. And it shouldn’t hide the extent of the innovation behind the kit. And why it is an example of what is happening in the German industry outside of the ChatGPT hype.
For more than 40 years, Schunk has been building high-precision gripping tools that are used in car factories, aerospace and mechanical engineering. They can move chunky boxes as well as delicate pipettes, sometimes gripping pipes and sometimes sucking in batteries. The company has refined the mechanics for this over decades and automated parts of the factory so much that robots can now easily work alongside people. But: “It is only now that all the technologies that enable the next level of autonomous robotics are coming together,” says Timo Gessmann, head of technology at Schunk. Now they have the mechanics, the data – and the brain.
Schunk relies on one artificial intelligence that can be used to automate processeswhich previously was thought to be beyond the capabilities of machines. If screws or small parts were offset by even half a centimeter on a tool table, Schunk’s grippers were overwhelmed and had to pause, sometimes shutting down production. Then a technician had to reset and reprogram the robot hand.
Today, Schunk’s robot hands can recognize and grasp parts – no matter how they are lying. For this purpose, the magic hand called the “Grasping Kit” is equipped with a camera system that feeds the AI with images so that it can move the gripper correctly. Gessmann says that for the first time, production processes that don’t always run the same way can now be automated. The AI is constantly learning. “That,” says Gessmann, “changes everything.”
German industry is perhaps undergoing the greatest upheaval since the Industrial Revolution. While the grippers and automatons were initially musclemen and later precision artists, they are now becoming thinking machines. This is made possible by the enormous development of their computing power, their networking and AI. The development is driven by companies that have the knowledge of the machines, which, unlike language models, is essential to actually making a difference.
So what is already possible for them today – and what do they hope to achieve when customers receive smart machines?
Timo Gessmann is an inventor. In his youth he dismantled computers and worked on go-karts. He is not only a trained engineer, but also a motor vehicle master. He researched the networking of machines at Bosch. Six years ago he moved to the much smaller medium-sized company Schunk as head of technology, where, among other things, he is responsible for digitalization and has a mission: “We want to make it possible for every medium-sized company to use AI.”
That sounds noble, but above all it shows that AI opens up new industries, markets and therefore customers for the company. Gessmann explains that the clever robot hands could now also be used in large carpentry shops, where things were previously too chaotic for their predecessors. For Schunk this means: more business, more sales and therefore growth despite the economic downturn and trade wars. In 2024, the 80-year-old company as a group turned over around 600 million euros – significantly more than in 2015. At that time it was just under 365 million euros. Timo Gessmann says: “Without AI we would make significantly less sales, or worst case: we would no longer be competitive at all.” This is also why he continues to push the expansion of AI. In addition to the clever gripper, Schunk is also currently developing a humanoid hand that can grip, turn and hold sensitively and could one day be used in operating rooms, for example. “That doesn’t exist yet, but it will.”
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