How Emerging Technologies will affect the Automation of Future Factories

By Embedded Advisor | Tuesday, December 04, 2018

The manufacturing sector has entirely changed what it was a decade ago. The manufacturing process is more dynamic now as compared to before and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), and Edge Computing (Edge) powered automation is revolutionizing the industry.

The needs of automation have shifted from operational automation to awareness of the self, predictive prowess, and intelligence. The automation of today will be obsolete in the future. Therefore, it is direly needful to re-imagine the automation solutions. AI, AR, and Edge will have a significant impact on the automation solutions of future factories, but some challenges are hindering the adoption of these technologies.

The vision of future factories must begin with the idea of automation. Innovation has played out, but the structural designs have not witnessed a significant change. Re-imagining automation starting from design, engineering, deployment, and operation should be the norm in every organization. Here are the three trends that can impact automation:

1) Artificial Intelligence: It can completely transfigure the human-centered engineering models by eliminating the error-prone human nature. AI can automate systems, facilitate continual operational learning and boost productivity.

 2) Edge Computing: It can assist in expanding the programmable logic controller (PLC) functionalities with a combination of additional computing power and personalized operational needs without completely disrupting the production architecture.

3) Augmented Reality: The Human-Machine Interface (HMI) will completely change due to AR. Operators will receive superior insights and high transparency. The production processes, the machines, and controllers will be easy to operate.

Other than industrial automation and advanced robots, new generations of autonomous systems, capable of doing more are driving improvements in methods and components including mechanics, sensors, and software. AI has made considerable strides in the past years as machine learning (ML) algorithms have become more sophisticated and have made use of massive increases in computing power and the quality datasets to train them.

The technologies above are already generating value in a range of products, services, and companies. These technologies assist in personalizing product recommendations, find anomalies on the product, identify fraudulent transactions, and more. AI is a trillion dollar industry and the deep learning techniques deploying artificial neural networks will increase $3.5 trillion to $5.8 trillion in annual value. This makes it the fact that AI deployment and automation technologies will be massive in the future and can uplift global economies and global prosperity. The latest AI generation advances in techniques like address classification, clustering problems, estimation, promises significantly more value and more..

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