Day 9 included our talk on German politics and our company visit to KUKA. To be honest I wasn’t too excited for the politics talk due to me not being very informed on foreign politics as well as my lack of interest in it. However, the talk was a pleasant surprise in that it was very interesting and insightful. I found it very interesting how our political system compared to the German system. The speaker was also a very good speaker which made the presentation more engaging and enjoyable.
I was especially excited for this day due to my company being KUKA. KUKA specializes in robots, which we saw in nearly every company we visited. Seeing how prevalent and important these robots are only fueled my excitement to visit the company. Our company tour started off with a very entertaining exhibit put on by the robots where their moved different boxes to display different pictures. We also saw an example of of their newest and most
revolutionary robot, the iwaa, which if the first robot that can collaborate with humans. After we saw these examples, we toured the factory.
Sadly our tour guide wasn’t the most exciting tour guide we had, but the factory was still very interesting. We learned that KUKA is essentially an assembling and programming company, meaning they get all of the parts for the robots and just assemble and program them. We also learned that KUKA is working on many more creative projects but regrettably we weren’t able to hear about the details of those projects just yet. Overall I thought that KUKA was a fascinating company with a very bright future, even with the anticipated future problems such as their partial shift to the Chinese market as a result of the Midea agreement, and the strong competition from rival robotics companies such as BBA.