Verona readies Marmomac as robotics reshape the quarry floor
The world's stone-industry showcase opens this week with automation, waterjet and 3D-survey firms claiming the largest hall footprint in the fair's history.
Editor-at-large · Verona · 6 min read
A five-axis machining cell on the Marmomac demo floor. Photograph for illustration.
For fifty-nine editions, Marmomac has been a fair about material — the quarried block, the polished slab, the finished façade. This year the material shares the halls with the machines that shape it, and increasingly with the software that tells those machines what to do.
Organisers confirmed that automation, waterjet and digital-survey exhibitors booked more floor space than any single category apart from raw stone itself — a first in the fair's history, and a fair reading of where the trade's investment is flowing.
The order book points to software
Machinery vendors we spoke to described a shift in what buyers ask for on the stand. The questions are no longer only about horsepower and blade diameter. They are about sensors, about data off the cut, and about whether a saw bought this year can be updated next year without replacing the frame.
Adaptive feed control — a load-sensing system that trims cutting speed in real time to protect the blade — is the clearest example. Once reserved for flagship machines, it is arriving as standard on the mid-range bridge saws that most fabricators actually buy.
The through-line is measurement. Diamond-wire tension sensors now report fatigue wirelessly off the moving wire; structured-light scanners hit sub-millimetre accuracy on the install site, not just in a lab; and nesting software is squeezing an extra six to nine per cent of usable slab from complex orders.
"Automation will not empty the quarry. It will change who is standing in it, and what they are paid to know."
What buyers should watch on the floor
For executives and engineers walking the halls this week, three questions separate a demo from a decision: does the machine expose its own data, can that data leave the machine, and who owns it once it does.
- Adaptive feed control moving from premium to standard on bridge saws.
- Vision-based slab matching book-matching veining across a full block.
- Photogrammetry and digital twins replacing the physical template.
Nova Media is reporting from the Marmomac press desk through the week. Corrections and source notes for this article are logged on our editorial standards page.
Editor-at-large covering stone machinery and manufacturing technology. Fifteen years on the trade-fair circuit, from Verona to Xiamen.