New-Tech Europe | February 2019

Image 3: The Go-IO industrial IoT reference design drives intelligence to the edge.

lights when a particular robot needs maintenance. But in the future, we may see more automated factories where the robots require much less human intervention when one unit goes down for repairs. This self-aware digital factory approach does have implications on the human workforce, but, again, it’s a shift that began as Industry 4.0 matured. Smaller and Smarter While machines handle repetitive and physically taxing tasks, people would service or repair the machines… and design them. As AI algorithms evolve to become more accurate and reliable, this will influence the need for compact programmable logic controller (PLC) modules that provide universal IO capabilities to drive the industrial internet of things (IIoT) to the next level of dynamic control. One technology that provides facets of this universal IO capability is IO-Link.

this is the case, wouldn’t this be a step backward instead of the next phase of a technological evolution? There’s room in the discussion for another perspective of Industry 5.0. In this view, as increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms become commonplace, there is a potential to enhance machine-to-machine communications. For instance, if a machine in a factory cell becomes limited in its function, another machine in the cell can automatically take over to perform the stalled machine’s task while still supporting its own main task. This capability, or nimbleness, of the manufacturing line to keep it up and running will foster a new breed of underlying ICs that provide a higher level of flexibility to adapt its functionality to the requested task at hand. At Tesla’s Fremont production plant, human workers are currently alerted by flashing red and yellow

This powerful point-to-point serial communications technology provides flexibility to interchange sensors via a common physical interface, creating a number of software-defined sensors based on the IO Device Description file. The IO-Link port then serves as a universal IO that can turn into any type of sensor, so a factory worker can remotely reprogram these intelligent sensors to handle changed or new manufacturing requirements. Sensors provide input stimuli (as analog voltages and currents as well as digital IO) while the PLC interprets these inputs to establish the operational conditions of the factory in its environment. Based on these conditions, the PLC must accurately make decisions to instruct the array of actuators to enable adaptive manufacturing, maintain throughput to keep the factory up and running, and provide the ability to improve the operational production efficiency of

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