INTEGRATION
Building towards Industry 4.0
Keely Portway finds out how vision systems can be more tightly integrated within factory machinery
T
he concept of the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, has been around for more than a decade, with
many big names such as Amazon, Siemens and Boeing early adopters of smart factory technology to make their production processes more efficient. While many markets have been negatively
impacted by Covid, manufacturing has been considered an essential or frontline service. Now, orders for automation equipment in manufacturing are coming thick and fast, and businesses are recognising a need for digital technologies to run more smoothly. As an example, telecoms vendor Huawei
last year launched its 5G digital engineering solution, based on the idea of site digital twins. It involves creating a digital replica of a physical site, so that factory infrastructure can be managed digitally throughout its lifecycle, from planning and design, to deployment and maintenance. Based on the digital twins, Huawei is using advanced photogrammetry and AI to help with digital network specification for telecoms. Tis is something with which vision
integration firm, Asentics, has been closely involved. Te firm’s chief executive, Dr Horst Heinol-Heikkinen, is also chairman of the VDMA OPC Vision group, a joint standardisation initiative led by the VDMA and the OPC Foundation, which aims to include machine vision in the industrial interoperability standard, Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA). Te open interface OPC UA was established as a standard in Industry 4.0, leading to the creation of the series of companion specifications to ensure the interoperability of machines, plants and systems.
Under control Te machine vision companion specification for OPC UA was launched to facilitate the generalised control of a machine vision system and abstract the necessary behaviour via a state model.
Intergro Technologies has several patents in machine vision
Te assumption of the model is the vision system in a production environment goes through a sequence of states that are of interest to, and can be influenced by, the environment. In addition to the information collected by image acquisition and transmitted to the environment, the vision system also receives relevant information from the environment. Because of the diversity of machine vision systems and their applications, other methods and manufacturer-specific extensions are necessary to manage the information flow. Te vision companion specification is therefore an industry-wide standard that is designed to allow freedom for changes or
‘We need to make sure that [Industry 4.0 hype] doesn’t dilute understanding about what machine vision can do’
32 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2021
individual additions. While part one of the companion specification focuses on the standardised integration of machine vision systems into automated production systems, part 2, currently in progress, will use this to describe the system and its components. Te focus will be on asset management and condition monitoring of these components. It’s not only image processing that is establishing a standard; the number of information models in general is increasing, with more companies and industry sectors getting involved. It is these models that form the foundation for the next goal: the digital twin. Asentics is heavily involved in this
development process and is a member of the recently formed Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA). Te aim of the association is to use the already established digital twin as an interoperable core technology for all future developments with regard to Industry 4.0. Heinol-Heikkinen is deputy chairman of IDTA. He says: ‘Te digital twin is the key investment in the future viability and crisis resilience of mechanical engineering. It is also an g
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Integro Technologies
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