AI blockchain startup Fetch.ai is partnering with industry veteran FESTO to launch a decentralised marketplace for manufacturing.
Fetch.ai is based in Cambridge, UK and has built an impressive team of talent with experience from DeepMind, Siemens, Sony, and a number of esteemed academic institutions. The company is working on decentralised autonomous “agents” which perform real-world tasks.
FESTO was founded in 1925 and currently produces and sells pneumatic and electrical control and drive technology. The company has continued to thrive over the years through consistent reinvention and likes to show off around once a year by developing bionic robots like its ‘flying fox’ which uses machine learning to optimise its flight behaviour with every manoeuvre:
The partnership with Fetch.ai is FESTO’s first foray into blockchain and shows how the company aims to remain at the cutting-edge of technological developments.
Fetch.ai will develop a decentralised manufacturing marketplace for FESTO to help transform the company’s existing control systems and make them more efficient.
Maria Minaricova, Director of Business Development at Fetch.ai, said:
“We are delighted to be able to announce a collaboration with such an advanced technology company like FESTO.
With FESTO’s contribution, we will be able to demonstrate in real life the benefits of autonomous AI agents in manufacturing and supply chain.
We look forward to working further with FESTO to bring about the wide adoption of these ground-breaking manufacturing innovations.”
The marketplace will make use of Fetch.ai’s technology stack and its ‘Multi-Agent’ architecture. FESTO hopes the marketplace will help to avoid some of the challenges with existing centralised manufacturing process likes demand fluctuations and uneven utilisation of capacity.
Fetch.ai explained the advantages of switching to a decentralised solution:
“The advantages of an agent-based-approach within a decentralised manufacturing framework have the potential to lead to supply-chain optimisation based on real-time information, increasing the responsiveness of the enterprise to the market requirements, a higher degree of autonomy in manufacturing, and delivering personalised, tailored orders to customers.”
A report from TrendMicro last year found that 65 percent of manufacturing environments are using outdated systems even when more secure and efficient options are available.
“Industry 4.0 offers unparalleled opportunities to increase productivity, enhance process efficiencies, and realise on-demand manufacturing,” said Steve Quane, Executive Vice President, Network Defense and Hybrid Cloud Security for Trend Micro.
