When you walk into today’s modern warehouse you will see vision-guided vehicles moving shelves, self-docking to recharge, and navigating complex areas by themselves. You’ll notice as orders come in, machine vision and imaging systems help the products move quickly from the warehouse to the recipient’s address through identification, sorting, packaging, and shipping applications. Machine vision and imaging systems are enabling technologies at the forefront of these exciting technological advancements.
Vision for Tracking
In an article on the AIA Vision Online website, Vision Technologies Boost Warehouse Efficiency, Transparency, barcode readers are described as “the bread and butter of imaging applications in the warehouse.”
Warehouse automation seems simple at first glance since the primary need is accurately reading a barcode and guiding a package to a destination; however, getting a large volume of packages to move quickly and accurately is a challenge, and success begins with leveraging information.
A collection of technology tracks packages on their paths through a shipping facility. Barcode readers are needed to recognize characters, sensors must detect either the presence or absence of a package, dimensioners scan the package to determine its volume, and machine vision cameras capture accuracy in labeling among other content.
Vision for Handling
While cameras, lighting, and cables are still purchased as separate components based on the application, there is a growing trend toward seamlessly integrating these components into a final solution, such as the autonomous vehicles from Fetch Robotics.
Handling packages efficiently means a positive return on investment. A company that invested in autonomous vehicles from Fetch noted that the machines traveled 1,000 kilometers in six months, a distance that employees no longer had to travel. In the article from Materials, Management and Distribution magazine, Robots proving ROI in California DC, the money spent to buy the vehicles was recouped in a few months.
Expect imaging to “become ubiquitous” as noted in the article Changing the face of machine vision? from Imaging and Machine Vision Europe.
As embedded vision becomes more widely used in warehouses, imaging will indeed be “everywhere.” Dedicated inspection stations may become obsolete, since vision systems will be built into robots and other autonomous vehicles being deployed in a variety of applications.
Vision for Profitability
The price of imaging technology has fallen steadily over the past several years. As a result, vision is more accessible now than ever before and innovation in the space is leading to many new applications. Linking a robot and vision system together has always been a challenge, but today’s vision systems offer sophisticated solutions to customers interested in installing vision-guided robot systems. In the feature, Vision-Guided Robotics Takes Evolutionary Steps with Revolutionary Benefits, available through AIA on Vision Online, the benefits of integrated vision are explored in detail.
Machine vision component markets are still thriving as well, because not every application is best suited for an all-in-one solution. When handling advanced 3D algorithms, for example, the memory requirements are intensive and having a machine vision system with a processing unit separate from the robot controller can work best.
A brief video in the Why I Automate series, available through the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), touches on machine vision. Why I Automate: Integro Technologies gives an inside look at the technology and vision system integration.
“Wherever a human being needs to look, 99% of the time we can do it with a camera,” says Integro’s Starke Farley, Sr. Sales Engineer. In the video, he says a client implemented a complete machine vision system and relocated the few human inspectors to other parts of the company’s operations. Inspection throughput increased by 600% in a year.
Imaging systems take many different forms and as the applications expand, it’s important to stay on top of the trends and developments to deploy them in the most valuable way.
Top 5 skills needed for the industrial
A blending of technologies to create new IIoT products and services will call for new expertise.
Over the next five years, the demand for IT workers will get a big boost from an unlikely source: manufacturers looking for networking pros who can help them run the industrial internet of things (IIoT).
Manufacturers in the US, Germany, Japan and China are on the cutting edge of something called Industry 4.0, which is digital transformation applied to manufacturing – bringing with it all the change, opportunities and challenges that represents. And it includes IoT devices that contribute to the manufacturing process.
According to the PwC’s 2016 Global Industry 4.0 Survey, manufacturers across a broad spectrum of industries plan to invest $907 billion per year for five years into Industry 4.0 initiatives.
“A major focus of this investment,” the report states, “will be on digital technologies like sensors or connectivity devices, as well as on software and applications like manufacturing execution systems (MES). Companies are also investing significantly in training their employees, hiring new specialists and driving organizational change.”
To make this vision a reality will take skilled IT people and technologists. And it won’t be just programmers and developers: network engineers will be needed to connect everything together and make sure it keeps working. Then, of course, there is a massive cyber security component. Every newly connected device potentially represents another vulnerability.
Agood way to envision all the skills that could be required to bring about an Industry 4.0 transformation is to think about IoT in the context of a highly-autonomous assembly line. It could include 3D printers and other additive manufacturing techniques running alongside computer numerical controlled (CNC) lathes and newer machines capable of executing highly variable, multi-step processes using robotic vision and artificial intelligence.
Add in cobots – collaborative robots that work alongside humans — and you have a technology landscape that calls not only for multiple skills sets but, in many instances, the blending of those skills to cut across silos and specializations to create whole new categories of technology professionals – ones who understand the convergence of operational technologies and information technologies, said Tanja Reuckert, executive vice president for SAP’s IoT & Customer Innovation Unit and the vice chair of the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC) steering committee.
“I believe now is the time we have to think cross-discipline or multi-discipline,” said Reuckert. “When you talk about the internet of things, people say it is about digitizing the thing. It’s actually about digitizing the business process. So I think engineers, network specialist, application developers, big data architects, UI [user interface] designers, business people need to talk to each other and understand each other.”
Because of this, many employers will have trouble defining exactly what skills or set of certifications they will need. Industry 4.0 is going to demand that teams of people come together to solve interrelated challenges. Specialists will still be required, of course, but they will also have to broaden their knowledge base to include not just other IT technologies but also the operational technologies like robotics and process automation that make factories and assembly lines work.
According to a 2016 Boston Consulting Group survey, this already is a major challenge. “[R]egardless of company size, respondents cited hiring talent and acquiring new capabilities as the most critical enablers for Industry 4.0 adoption. As one executive explained, ‘The needed capabilities don’t currently exist in our company, and we believe they’ll be hard to find.'”
So, with that in mind and in no particular order of importance, here is a short list of the in-demand IT skills manufacturers will need as they begin their Industry 4.0 transitions.
