You didn’t follow a traditional path into robotics, did you?
Definitely not – I come from a business background. I worked in multinational companies for 15 years; I have an MBA from the Budapest University of Economics and I’ve also completed executive management programs at both INSEAD and Wharton. I ended up as head of sales and marketing for central Europe in a large FMCG company and there I started to notice a huge difference between how multinationals operated compared to smaller Hungarian SMEs. I could see the Hungarian companies struggling to manage their businesses, so I thought that there was a market potential to improve them and out of that the idea for Pannon Business Network (PBN) was formed. And PBN has now been in existence for almost 20 years helping companies with innovation management.

You must have seen a lot of change in 20 years?
Our core purpose hasn’t changed, in that we want to improve Hungarian businesses. On a personal level however, I decided to go back to school, and I enrolled onto a PhD program in manufacturing engineering and material science so that I could better understand how the manufacturing process worked.

That’s quite the transformation!
[Laughs] I struggled like hell with the mathematics, but it gives me credibility when I interact with engineering firms. It means that I have a more in-depth understanding of their processes and what their challenges are when they talk to me.

And what is PBN‘s focus today?
PBN is an applied research & development and training centre. Our core focus is creating added-value growth for companies. Seven years ago, digitalisation started to play a bigger role for us so we sat down to understand how we could adopt Industry 4.0 in a Hungarian context. At that point we started with 3D printing and robotics, building both competencies and also the physical infrastructure. Today we actually have a model automated production line in-house as part of our ‘factory of the future’ where we integrate the business, the controlling, the energy, and the manufacturing into one procedure. Last year we had over a thousand visitors through our doors, and we’ve won awards for our Digital Innovation Hub activities. We’ve come a long way in these 20 years, but we have a strong desire to keep the journey going onto the next stage of innovation.

And what kind of innovation is coming?
We have a lot of senior citizens here in western Hungary and we can use them to test products and solutions that eventually they and future generations can benefit from. We’ve built a ‘smart senior room’ on the second floor of our building, and we use that to educate companies and try to get them to understand that this is going to be a significant business opportunity, not just in Hungary but on a European and even a global scale. By the end of the year, we’re aiming to have 100 private households contracted to our eco-system and we’ll be able to develop and test products using those households. We’re also working heavily on recycling and sustainability. We want to achieve zero waste with our manufacturing model, so for example we’re in the process of integrating solar panels into our facility with the aim of using 100% green-energy.

What sort of manufacturing challenges are you facing in your region?
We have a huge shortage of labour – essentially, we have zero unemployment. Net wages next door in Austria are 2.5 times higher than here in western Hungary so it’s very difficult to keep people. Thousands of people cross the border to work every day. So, to keep those people employed domestically we need to have added-value jobs and that means we need to outsource the repetitive low-value jobs. And the best way to outsource is to robotize.

One of our tasks in DIH² was to fund 26 Transfer Technology Experiments (TTEs) to support our goal to advance factories through robotics. Was it easy to find suitable candidates?
Actually yes. We communicated the opportunity through our ecosystem, but it seems that a lot of companies were already aware and we ended up with a lot of interest from Hungarian companies.

You oversaw two TTEs in Hungary – MediScara and Robo4Toys. Let’s start with MediScara – what’s the story behind that?
Medicor is a long-established Hungarian medical device manufacturer producing cutting-edge technology for neonatal care and like many SMEs they face issues with supply chain fragility, but Medicor also has the problem of how to comply with new European legislation coming into force that will require all medical devices to be traceable and labelled with unique IDs. HSM Automatika is a highly experienced robotic tech provider, and they addressed these two challenges by developing MediScara. It’s a modular solution featuring two robotic cells, one a 6-axis robot, and a second using automated visual checks and laser marking. The solution contains 3 highly reusable ROSE-APs that mean MediScara can be adapted to address similar requirements of other SMEs.

And what about Robo4Toys?
Robo4Toys is a project that addresses robotics for integrated injection demoulding, de/palettizing, quality inspection and assembly of toys. Artrade Kft is a renowned Hungarian toy producer that has been in business for 30 years. In Robo4Toys, we focused on the Dice-on-Dice product which consists of plastic components and bolt magnets. Part-manufacturing was already highly automated however assembly of the toy end-product was being done manually. Meanwhile Grip-Plast Kft has 11 years’ experience in automating plastic production and their task here was to automate the assembly process of the Dice-on-Dice product and take Artrade from an Industry 1.0 to an Industry 4.0 automation level. The solution uses three industrial robots, exchange grippers, machine vision and a tray palletizing/depalletizing system. On the shop floor, the operator’s intervention need has gone from continuous to real-time on-call mode, and both the operator and the production manager can monitor all production events and KPIs on-site and on remote real-time digitized platforms.

Sounds like both projects were a success. What other learnings did you get from your involvement?
I think that the way we’ve implemented these TTEs across the DIH² Network is a great model. On the surface, DIH² is a big European project, however when it came to execution the TTEs operated at a local level. This meant we were able to talk the same language and understand the industrial culture that they worked in. A major component of the success behind these came from the ability to reach out and connect personally when there were problems. We were also pleasantly surprised by FiWare, and as it turns out, so were the technology providers, for whom it was the first time they’d developed a solution like this in an open-source product. At PBN we were practically learning about FiWare alongside the tech providers, but it enabled us to see how we could use it internally and now our development engineers have become FiWare experts.

What has DIH² meant to you and PBN?
This wasn’t our first European project. We’ve actually been involved with 96 of them to date, and in those we’ve experienced various different and diverse structures. This was the first time we’ve been involved with one that was very shop-floor-implementation orientated and as it was a mix of technical and not-so-technical tasks, a big learning for us was how to figure out what profile of people we needed to involve in which areas at various stages of the project. We were also there right at the beginning when the proposal was put together so it was a great opportunity to learn in-depth how Horizon2020 was structured and particularly how cascade funding was being delivered.

Last question – what sort of technology do you think we’re going to see changing the shopfloor in the coming years?
For us it’s about everything that puts the human in the centre, rather than the robot. To achieve that we’ll need devices and technological solutions and there’s two specific directions that we’re focusing on: Neuralink and Mixed Reality both of which will enable us to change the way we learn and operate robots. This is going to be an area of huge potential – it’s very exciting.