Nabtesco highlights innovations at Automatica 2022

With many years of experience in robotics and automation Nabtesco regularly attends Automatica. This year the cycloidal gear specialist took part once again, with a sparkling display of innovations.

Nabtesco’s motto for this year’s trade show was ‘lightgears ahead’. “Our cycloidal gears substantially improve efficiency and performance in production. Or in other words, we take our customers – robot manufacturers and mechanical engineers alike – along on the journey of being light years ahead,” said Daniel Obladen, head of sales for general industries at Nabtesco Precision Europe, explaining the pun in the slogan. “We are a reliable partner when it comes to growth – also in times of strained supply chains. We have successfully proven that in the past two years.” 

The entire universe of Nabtesco products was on display at the company’s booth – component sets, servo gearboxes, rotary indexers, OVALO strain wave gears, a drive unit with a Mecanum wheel, and much more. The new Neco, NecoHT and Zeta products received a great deal of interest among the Automatica visitors.

The Zeta series (RV-ZTM) is a high-precision gearbox that was specially developed by Nabtesco for large-scale robotics projects. These gears are said to offer up to 20 percent higher flexural and torsional rigidity than previous robotic gears and are designed for a high level of modularity.

Although the servo gearboxes of the Neco series have already been on the market for two years, the pandemic had prevented their being presented at a major trade show. For the first time, the company also presented the brand new high-torque gears of the NecoHT series. These extremely heavy-duty gearboxes expand the spectrum of use of the Neco series for heavy-duty applications and are fully equal to the smaller sizes with respect to performance, user friendliness and cost effectiveness.

Another focus of interest was future real-time monitoring of robots by means of component-specific gear data and digital twin gears. A joint project by Nabtesco and Keba takes a new approach to predictive maintenance and is said to introduce an innovative perspective for modern maintenance concepts within Industry 4.0.