Bionics is powering the fourth stage of the Industrial Revolution, and WorldSkills Global Partner for over 30 years, Festo, is an international leader in the field. Festo’s expertise in automation and technical education has enriched the WorldSkills Museum, making it educational, engaging, and a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in how Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is shaping our industries.
To mark its contributions to WorldSkills Museum, Festo has produced a promotional video that takes viewers on a tour of its exhibits, from bionics to its innovative and sustainable water filtration technology, as well as highlighting the huge variety of other artefacts on display through the rest of the Museum.
As the film shows, one of Festo’s most remarkable contributions to the Museum is its bionics exhibit, which illustrates how the movement of animals in nature have inspired the development of robotics in industrial manufacturing. The exhibit captivates visitors with its futuristic designs and educational information, illustrating the intricate connections between biology and technology.
From elephant trunks to fish fins, it shows how nature can inspire motion control in industrial manufacturing, by overlaying animal movements with its innovative robotics. The flick of a chameleon’s tongue as it captures its prey, for instance, has the highest acceleration and power output of all reptiles, mammals, and birds. It is the inspiration behind a bionic robot developed by Festo that applies the same principles of power, acceleration and suction to its industrial FlexShapeGripper that can hold on to, and move, any object.
Festo’s contributions have significantly enhanced the WorldSkills Museum and are helping draw thousands of visitors a week to this incredible building on the banks of the Huangpu River. As Festo’s film shows, the WorldSkills Museum is inspiring a new generation of young people to think about skills development for themselves and imagine themselves using skills to help build a more sustainable future.
The partnership between Festo and WorldSkills is an exceptional example of how collaboration between industry leaders and the skills community can drive progress. Alongside its contributions to the Museum, Festo has been instrumental in the development of four skill competitions: Mechatronics, Industry 4.0, Water Technology, and Renewable Energy. It has also led many training and capacity building programmes both online and on the ground, most recently its webinar in June on the role of data analytics in predictive maintenance and practical demonstrations of machine learning applications within a learning factory environment.
Elfi Klumpp, Head of Partnership Development Global Education at Festo Didactic, says, “We were keen to support the WorldSkills Museum as soon as plans for it were unveiled back in 2017. We are happy to be playing a part in bringing this great vision to life and connecting the achievements of the past with the huge opportunities that TVET represents for the future. Our film is just one of the ways we are promoting the value of the Museum and we will continue to build on our exhibit and find new ways, with WorldSkills, to inspire more young people to harness the power of skills.”