News · September 2026

Think-PLC at IMTS 2026: Danobat Robotics, Siemens Leadership, and a Lathe for the Shop

A week in Chicago with the machine builders, the controls people and the ideas that will show up in our shop and our customers' plants over the next year.

IMTS 2026 ran September 14 through 19 at McCormick Place, and Think-PLC spent the week there the way we always try to: less time collecting brochures, more time with the people we build with. We came home with a stronger set of partnerships, a clearer read on where machine tool controls are going, and a short list of lathes for our own CNC shop.

Danobat's new robotics offering, cutting live

The highlight of the week was time with Danobat. Our relationship with the Danobat team is a strong one, built on SINUMERIK and on a shared view that a machine and its automation should be engineered as one system. At IMTS they showed their new robotics offering running on the floor: a robot-tended cell loading and unloading while the machine cut, all of it coordinated through the same SINUMERIK controller that runs the axes.

That is exactly the kind of cell Think-PLC's SINUMERIK Run MyRobot work is aimed at, where the robot is programmed and monitored from the machine's own control rather than a separate pendant and a separate PLC. Watching it cut, and talking through what the next installations will need from the control cabinet, was worth the trip on its own.

Siemens from the machine tool to the plant floor, and time with senior leadership

Siemens brought its whole portfolio to IMTS this year, and we made a point of covering all of it: the machine tool side with SINUMERIK ONE, digital twins and the Run MyRobot ecosystem, and the factory automation side with the S7-1500, the new S7-1200 G2 generation and the Industrial Edge and cloud tooling that ties a machine into the rest of the plant.

As a Siemens Solution Partner we were also invited to sit down with senior leadership at Siemens and share what we are seeing from the integrator's seat: what machine builders ask us for, where retrofits get stuck, what makes a controls platform easy or hard to standardize on, and what our customers in food, packaging and job-shop machining actually need next. Those conversations are two-way. We left with a better understanding of the roadmap, and Siemens left with a clear picture of what a shop like ours runs into every week.

TRAK Machine Tools, a strategic partner

We spent a good stretch with the TRAK Machine Tools team as well. TRAK is a strategic partner of Think-PLC, and the relationship runs deeper than a handshake on a show floor: we own and operate a TRAK vertical machining center with a SINUMERIK control in our own shop, so we know their machines the way a customer does, from the spindle to the operator screen. TRAK builds the ProtoTRAK line of shop-friendly CNC knee mills, bed mills and lathes, and their approach to the operator, a control a machinist can pick up in an afternoon, lines up with how we think about HMIs on the equipment we build. The conversation was about where we go next together: what small and mid-size shops want from a control, and where a builder like TRAK and an integrator like Think-PLC can help each other's customers.

Shopping for a CNC lathe for our own shop

Think-PLC runs a CNC shop of its own, and it is busy. Our machined parts, laser-cut parts and custom back-panel programs have grown to the point where turning work is the bottleneck, so part of the week was spent as a buyer rather than a builder: walking the lathe aisles, talking chuck sizes, bar capacity, live tooling and, of course, which control is on the machine. We have a short list. When the machine lands in the shop, the same asset record, QR label and service history we give our customers will be on it from day one.

A great week

Trade shows are only worth it if the conversations turn into work. This one will. Thank you to the Danobat, Siemens and TRAK teams for their time, and to the customers and partners who stopped by to talk about their projects. If you saw something at IMTS you want to bring into your plant, whether it is a robot-tended cell, a control retrofit or a new machine that needs to talk to the rest of your line, talk to us.