Surface treatment operations, such as polishing, painting, coating and others, play a critical role in manufacturing quality and product performance. Yet, despite decades of automation in machining, welding, and assembly, these processes remain among the most difficult to automate. As manufacturing faces increasing pressure from labor shortages, quality demands, and cost constraints, intelligent robotics is emerging as a key enabler for transforming surface treatments.

1. Why surface treatments are so difficult to automate

In modern industrial environments, integrating heterogeneous systems and protocols is still painfully manual. Digital twins and data pipelines promise interoperability, but bridging raw machine data to structured digital representations often means editing piles of JSON by hand—slow, brittle, and error-prone.

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