Here comes the Fifth Wave of manufacturing automation

For a long time now—a dozen years or more—Industry 4.0 has been a standard and a much-covered topic in the media as well as at seminars and trade shows. Arguably, much of the strength of Industry 4.0 is in the areas of connectivity and management. In fact, management stems not only from connectivity but data handling and the ability to pass “states” (like working on “Job 4335,” for instance) and information (32 out of 105 parts are blanked) from machine to shop floor to office and back again.

What Industry 4.0 does not cover includes: machine vision, robotics, material automation (including material handling, transport, load/unload functions, and even machine tending), software, artificial intelligence, cameras, sensors, and even automated conveyors and mobile robots. Many people come to the errant conclusion that it must cover these areas named above, because there is no specific exclusion of these subjects.

In 2010, if we were to have given the Industry 4.0 standards team a software package that did imaging, and said, “make sure this is covered in the standard,” they would have quickly (and probably successfully) argued that it doesn’t have much to do with bending or cutting a piece of steel. They would have been right; it was not part of the manufacturing process at the time. As a result, it was not included in Industry 4.0.

But there are many things that were not part of manufacturing a dozen years ago that we are finding extremely useful today. In another two years robots will be commonplace at work in manufacturing facilities. Vision systems have crept into the door in applications like cut accuracy, temperature-driven machine actions, part sorting, material provision to a specific machine or subsystem…the list continues to grow. And cameras are all over the place, even inside the very machine tools we use every day.

The onslaught of technology from within—and especially from without—the manufacturing and machine tool industry is just too new to be covered with older standards. The exciting part is that these technologies are about to change the business of metal manufacturing (really, all manufacturing).

Interestingly, the Fifth Wave of technology often has little to do with the core purpose of a function or even a machine tool. Take the case of a laser cutter and a thick piece of stock. Cutting rates of such materials are well known to each manufacturer. Depending on the material and the gas used to cool the cut, it is possible to damage the material by cutting it out of spec. In one laser cutter available now, a camera records the cut as the laser head moves across the piece of steel or other metal. The Fifth-Wave type of system consists of a camera, a sensor, and artificial intelligence that reads the color of the cut, determines the temperature and whether it represents a good cut.

While this system is not about the laser’s power or focus—these would be core purpose/technology items—it is equally as valuable to save avoidable downtime by managing the process using outside technology to continue working in the most optimal level possible.

The Fifth Wave is here and it has many promises. But it will take some understanding of its many components to leverage its strengths. One sure way to make the transition is to continue to learn about these exciting manufacturing technologies.

Author: Dave Brambert

Article source: https://article-realm.com/article/Business/47514-Here-comes-the-Fifth-Wave-of-manufacturing-automation.html