FESTO

Many would be aware that Festool used to be called Festo.  The Festool portion of the company was spun off in 2000 to concentrate on the tools that we know and love (if you’ve been able to justify the purchase).

However, Festo has not vanished, and the company has been concentrating on automation technology.

A couple of interesting products that have come out of the Festo company includes the Smartbird (an automation of a seagull), and the BionicOpter, which is the automation version of a dragonfly.  Pretty incredible engineering! Festo then take the lessons learned from these proof of concepts, and apply them to real-world automation applications.