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Cisco teams up with robot company so it can watch hundreds of robots on factory floors
(Business Insider)
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
Cisco's new CEO Chuck Robbins is convinced that the company's future rests on the big new thing called the Internet of Things, where all kinds of machines and objects get sensors, apps and join the internet.
On Monday, at a press conference at the company's headquarters in San Jose, California, Cisco announced a big new partnership with robotics company Fanuc for something Fanuc calls "zero downtime."
Fanuc and Cisco have created an IoT system that allows Fanuc to watch every robot on the factory floor, see what's going on with it to predict if and when a particular robot is going to have issues. A service technician can then fix the robot before it fails.
The two companies are already testing it in a pilot that involves about 1,800 robots and includes Fanuc customer GM.
Fanuc says that the test has already saved its customers $38 million. It has plans to roll it out to 2,500 robots by the end of the year.
"This is definitely a game changer,"Andy Denny, VP of Robot Operations Fanuc America told the room. "Think of that. A facility that predicts when equipment is going to fail before it fails."
This partnership follows one last week with GE. GE said it would use Cisco's IoT tech to do a similar thing for 100 of GE's factories.
Robbins believes that the IofT will be "bigger than the first wave of the internet. It has to be, there will be 30 times the number of devices connect compared to what's connected [to the internet] today."
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