Feature: Industrial
Single-board computers for modern industrial applications
By Romain Soreau, Head of Single Board Computing, Farnell
the days of Henry Ford this has been the metaphor for high productivity in manufacturing. However, it is one that is notoriously inflexible. Te static nature of the fixed production line makes it hard to customise products or reschedule operations to produce different products as demand changes. Industry 4.0 breaks down the production line, providing the opportunity to make manufacturing a far more flexible, cost-effective and sustainable operation than has ever been possible before. A new generation of single-board
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computers (SBCs) are now available that support industrial use developed for and increasingly adopted to smarten manufacturing facilities and support the move to Industry 4.0. Although Industry
well-known image of industrial production is that of conveyors passing components and subsystems down a fixed line. Since
4.0 introduces novel ways to restructure the factory, manufacturers do not have to replace everything, and SBCs can be used to drive new benefits in a range of ways.
Key components Tere are several key components to Industry 4.0. One replaces the single, fixed production line with cells that can be dynamically reconfigured down to individual orders. A smart, fully- automated factory will involve systems such as robots and cobots, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), conveyor segments and manipulators to move components and subsystems around the factory to where they are needed. To facilitate this smarter approach, each product is tagged. Staff, machine tools and robots use information from the tag, to determine what needs to happen next on each product’s journey. Even the cells themselves, which could consist of several machine tools and robots, may be virtual in that their component parts can
22 September 2023
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
be dynamically assigned to other cells, as needed. Secondly, machine tools interact with
each other and the cloud in real time, using wired and wireless networking technologies as part of the connectivity of the Industry 4.0 plant. Te cloud (its remote data servers) then use computation and artificial intelligence (AI) to reconfigure the shopfloor systems in smarter ways. Finally, sensors track the status of
everything on the shopfloor. RFID readers pick up information from each product using its tag. Various sensors check the progress and quality of the product at each step so that repairs can be made in good time, and maintenance kept up. If the surface finish of a product is found to be moving out of specification, for example, it could indicate a problem with an upstream machine, or with the raw materials. By recognising these situations quickly, the Industry 4.0 factory avoids waste and the costs it incurs. Te result
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