More than ever before, by rolling no less than six leading trade fairs into one, HANNOVER MESSE is the unrivaled global event for the entire manufacturing value chain. The new Integrated Automation, Motion & Drives trade fair now covers the full spectrum of industrial automation, IT and drive and fluid technology. This Industry 4.0 hotspot can't help but generate cross-sector synergies and fuse production with intralogistics. Plenty of incentive, therefore, to tempt YASKAWA, a world-leading manufacturer of servo drives, frequency inverters and MOTOMAN industrial robots, to showcase its innovations in Hannover.

One of YASKAWA's main highlights at HANNOVER MESSE 2018 was the European launch of its i³ Mechatronics. This new concept is the impressive result of its head-on drive to embrace Industry 4.0 by moving traditional mechatronics into the digital age - harnessing all the benefits that this offers. Whether robots, drive and control technology, information and communication technology, artificial intelligence, big data or the Internet of Things, it’s all networked via the concept’s backbone, the YASKAWA Cockpit software platform. The company has just completed intensive development work to create this cutting-edge system for analyzing and clearly visualizing process and system data, among other things. The platform also displays the real-time status of each machine and relates this information to other data sources, which of course sets the stage for the coordinated predictive maintenance at the heart of Industry 4.0.