Automate 2024 Hits New Heights with Record Attendance, Industry Acclaim

Phoenix Contact’s Ted Thayer, who had started to lose his voice by Day 3, had this to say: “It’s been a really good show for us so far…I’ve talked to a lot of great customers about our open automation platform plus about all the different tie-ins we have…it’s been wonderful.”

“We just broke our record for number of visits,” said Edward Neff, CEO of SMAC Corp., a maker of programmable electric actuators based on moving coil linear servo motors.  He also recognized that times are changing: “Everybody wants to switch [to electric]…pneumatics are World War II tech…they’re hanging in there, but you can buy the pneumatic stuff on Amazon now.

“If you get your price low enough, then you get lots of people coming by,” he added. “And it took us a while to do it, but we did it.”

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In the Tormach booth, CEO Dan Rogge said they had the only machine at the show that was cutting parts, “So a lot of people [are] paying attention to that. I think we found one of our niches here.”

“The show’s been really well attended,” Mujin Corp.’s Josh Cloer told Machine Design. “There’s a lot of robotics integrator companies that are coming by and looking at how they could use the Mujin controller to advance the capabilities of their systems or shorten the time it takes to deploy a system commission system. And there’s a lot of good end users out here looking for bin picking and palletizing,” he said.

Echoing all of the above, Brian Dengel from KHK USA, said, “Traffic has been great. Lots of new opportunities. Great to see old customers. Great to meet new customers. Terrific.”