Industry 4.0 is transforming current manufacturing practices. Big data, advanced robotics, industrial connectivity, …. All are impacting the manufacturing machines and processes with the goal to make production processes more flexible to deal with large variety of products, digitize all manufacturing steps to trace back relevant historical information, and create a digital signature of generated products that contains related information throughout its lifecycle.
Key enabler technologies that would allow this transformation are emerging and becoming more and more available: new sensor’s generation with smart connectivity, big-data compatible processors, collaborative robots, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, condition monitoring, …. When properly implemented in a manufacturing ecosystem, these technologies will transform conventional manufacturing into smart manufacturing.
In this presentation, we will showcase some practical examples where these topics and their impact on manufacturing are clearly highlighted.
Some of these examples are related to Smart Clamping for (CNC) machining centers, digital signature of an additively manufactured product, smart fleet with interconnected condition monitoring systems, digital instruction and their usage by collaborative robots.