Page 20 - trends in automation
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Interview
trends in automation:
How
do you think the production
of the future will look?
Dr. Peter Post:
I think the future of
production will demand a great
degree of flexibility and adaptivity.
Huge amounts of time and money
are going into the construction
of production plants that meet
specific requirements. If something
changes in the product, you have to
completely redesign and convert
parts of the plant. I believe that in
the future, production plants will have
components that are networked in
an intelligent way, carry out their
own configuration with minimal effort
and independently meet the varying
requirements in production orders.
This will give us maximum flexibility.
trends in automation:
So the
production plant of the future will
have decentralised intelligence?
Dr. Peter Post:
In the context of
the production of the future,
decentralised intelligence means
that tasks that are currently still
performed by the master computer
will be taken over by the component.
Everything required to control a
single partial order could therefore
be carried out in the mini control
system on site by the component.
You can read the entire interview at
Dr. Peter Post,
Head of Corporate Research
and Programme Strategy at Festo
Intelligent textiles:
Fabric with an integrated electronic component (LED) and with woven in
insulated electrical conductors. Possible use in protective clothing with signal messages.
Photo: ITV Denkendorf, Forschungsbereich Smart Textiles
The Internet of Things
Futurologists believe that there will
soon be more things than people on the
Internet. Entire systems will be able to
communicate beyond their own physical
boundaries. This will be made possible
thanks to the so called “Internet of
Things”. A milestone in this development
was reached in June last year. Most
people will have been completely
unaware of the switch over to the
Internet Protocol Version 6, which
increased the number of available IP
addresses from 4.3 billion to 340
sextillion (sextillion = a number with 36
zeros). This development will allow
mobile phones, computers, cars,
transport containers, articles of clothing
and machines to be assigned their own
IP addresses. Hans Vestberg, CEO of
Ericsson, the world’s biggest provider of
telecommunications equipment, believes
that up to 50 billion devices such as
cars, for example, will be networked with
one another by 2020. Sensors installed
in a car will detect ice on the road and
send a warning to the cars behind. Prof.
Wahlster, Director of the German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
(DFKI), believes that this technology will
be ready for production in two to three
years. (You can read more about this
topic in the interview on page 6.)
The digital product memory
In the industry of the future, the internal
states of devices, materials, objects and
environments will be recorded using
integrated information technology and
linked with the real states of industrial
processes. For example, the material to
be processed will use RFID to inform the
machine which work steps have already
been carried out and which are still
outstanding. Machines will identify the
individual product and perform the
required work steps automatically along
with any tool changes that are necessary.
The product memory will also serve as life
long documentation.
