NIMAK - Auto Focus 2021

In 1957, Engelberger convinced the CEO of Consolidated Controls Corp. (Condec), where he was then a director, to finance the further development of the first industrial robot. After two years, Engelberger and Devol produced the first Unimate. This had a mechanical arm that could execute several commands stored on a magnetic drum. In 1959, General Motors installed the first prototype, and in 1961, the Unimate was used on the production line at General Motors. In 1968, the Japanese company Kawasaki obtained the licence rights to produce Unimate in Japan for the Asian market. In Germany, hydraulic industrial robots helped Mercedes-Benz in car production from 1970 onwards. However, Unimation‘s robots, which were initially intended to perform spot welding under heavy loads, had a disadvantage: They were barely able to cope with the work. The Augsburg-based robotics pioneer Kuka was acting as Unimation‘s German distributor at the time. Kuka upgraded the American robots for the heavy work. The starting signal for in-house robot development had been given. In 1973, the Augsburg-based company finally built the world‘s first industrial robot with six electromechanically driven axes, known as Famulus. For TÜNKERS – as an important supplier for the industrial robot environment – the further development of this technology was not only of particular importance, but from today‘s perspective, the TÜNKERS was also involved in this process through Günther Nickel and the Niko company. Günther Nickel, the brother of the founder of NIMAK GmbH, developed and manufactured gantry robots with a team of 120 employees in Wissen as early as the 1980s. This was the time when manual production in automotive industry body shops was increasingly being replaced by automation. The gantry robots from NIKO were used at BMW in Munich, AUDI in Dingolfing and Ingolstadt as well as the FORD plants in Cologne, Saarlouis, Detroit and Valencia, and were also sold under the names of the then largest robot manufacturers, GMF and ABB. Other milestones in the company‘s history were the design award for „the world‘s most beautiful robot“ and the delivery of a robot to NASA: a robot from Wissen in the Westerwald was used to clean rockets at Cape Canaveral! The next development step was not long in coming – a hall was to be built in Köttingen, near Wissen, with enough space to accommodate half a jumbo jet. This was to be cleaned independently by an automatically moving robot using a telescopic arm. Unfortunately, this ambitious project did not come to fruition, since the gantry robots were replaced on the market by the increasingly cheaper articulated-arm robots with 6 axes. HISTORY OF AUTOMATION TECHNOLOGY The NIKO gantry robot, which was awarded the then design prize for „the world‘s most beautiful robot“.