Hanover Fair: Where humans meet machines

The night before opening, the exhibition halls are a blur of activity; saws and hammers are at the ready as the various stands are put together. This is a night for the builders, one of whom is pictured here. Elsewhere, packs of cleaners buzz around, organizing and disposing of the many tons of packaging material and waste.

By Monday morning, everything is ready and the visitors can come in. The organizers are expecting up to 200,000 people. That's much less than during the fair's heyday, when up to 500,000 would regularly come. An arguably more important number is the amount of trade fair contacts made between those exhibiting and attending. The organizers reckon there are around 5 million of those.

Nobody has counted them all, but it's clear that many thousands of robots are on hand to help out at what is the biggest industrial fair in the world. They come in all shapes and sizes and they are getting smarter, not to mention more tame and easier to work with.

When humans and robots work together on something, safety is obviously of paramount importance. The robot pictured here, developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has several sensors which ensure that the robot retreats or is halted when a safety distance is exceeded.

Christian Trapp is an engineer with the automation firm Festo. He and his colleagues have developed a self-learning work-aid robot. Controlled via eye detection, voice control, remote control, VR glasses and sensors on clothes, the machine learns on the job.

Mexico is the first Latin American country to be a partner country of the Hanover Fair. There are 150 Mexican exhibitors there, and the country's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, opened the industrial show with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Heard at the exchange of jerseys was the sentiment that the only wall Mexico needs any time soon will be when they play Germany in the forthcoming World Cup.

The Hanover Trade Fair has long been an important port of call for large IT firms, such as Microsoft. Pictured here is a corn sorting machine from Swiss firm Bühler. Using a cloud-based solution, it can isolate harmful corn kernels contaminated with aflatoxins, a naturally occurring fungal toxin that can be highly dangerous if it enters the food chain.

If electric cars are to become a common feature of German roads, the country will need a comprehensive network of efficient charging stations. The industrial company ABB already knows electricity; now it is bringing that expertise to the road. The charging station pictured behind the car here puts more power in, with greater range and for less charging time than many current alternatives.

E-mobility is nothing new in some quarters. The electric cart has been around for decades, especially as a means of transport in factories. Jungheinrich, a manufacturer of forklift trucks and other warehouse vehicles, has a lot of experience with battery technology because many of these vehicles are electric. This one can pull as much as 28 tons behind it.

The German robot firm Kuka, now under Chinese ownership, is a world market leader thanks to its increasingly intelligent industrial robots. Now the firm is developing robots for the home. The prototypes, named "I do", can bring you coffee, operate as a games console and even as an air conditioning machine.

With so many robots, servers, computers and other digital applications in operation, the possibility of errors grows in proportion. So what kind of issues might crop up when things go wrong in the factory of the future? Simply turn it off and on again? Send everyone home? Whatever happens, jobs on the IT 24/7 hotline are unlikely to go away any time soon.