drag&bot GmbH, a spin-off from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, already employs a workforce of 15 (that's including its four founding members) just one year after starting out. The team has its sights firmly set on developing generic software for programming industrial robots that is both simple and intuitive. The aim is to design a graphic user interface that enables fast and flexible programming by dragging and dropping predefined tasks from blocks of functions. The startup is appearing at HANNOVER MESSE 2018 as a partner of the Young Tech Enterprises zone, where it’s offering visitors the opportunity to experience the future of robot programming first-hand.

Making robot programming open to all - that's what drag&bot is all about. The company believes the best way to achieve this is by using an intuitive graphic user interface that even complete novices can use to solve complex tasks. Instead of programming robots the conventional way, users can simply drag and drop predefined tasks from various function blocks to piece together a program, and intuitive wizards make it just as quick and easy to set the parameters. This web-based software is designed to be compatible with many makes of robots and components, and the layout of the user interface always remains the same. The developers of drag&bot are intent on providing a highly flexible and cost-efficient approach to using industrial robots in production by significantly reducing the time taken for setup and configuration - and removing the threshold of robotics expertise required to do so. At last, this promises a simple solution for automating and implementing even variable production processes with small batch sizes.

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