The 'Innovation Stand' at the Automation Fair, organized by Rockwell Automation, the world's largest industrial automation company, was this year's place where dreams meet reality, concepts meet creativity and digital meets physical. At the show in Philadelphia, the highlight of the futurist stand was to demonstrate how digital and physical components can be seamlessly integrated into a fast, cost-effective and optimally designed and built production facility. John Pritchard, Strategic Business Development Manager, Rockwell Automation , explains: "Digital and physical components have numerous advantages, but the most important ones are the obvious innovation and fast deployment times. It's a place that showcases how these technologies will come together in the digital world to improve physical operations." Pritchard continues: "In this scenario, a manufacturer can have an idea and test it faster and at no cost. Allows designs to be repeated. You can test five or six separate ideas one morning. You can learn a lot faster and for less cost than you can in the physical world. Thus, the speed and cost of innovation is reduced."

The future, here and now

Pritchard said that we will continue to see more flexible and agile technologies such as MagneMotion and iTrak, and that the production line demo; MagneMotion includes a number of forward-looking technologies offered by Rockwell Automation, including conveying technology. Giving information about PTC Vuforia Augmented Reality (AR) software, Pritchard said: "Microsoft HoloLens is working on it to allow quality control with sound control in a semi-virtual environment. The quality control station allows you to use augmented reality to receive work instructions and perform quality control using voice commands." Noting that field scanners using infrared rays are used for safety purposes, Pritchard said, "Augmented Reality is also a method to see safe areas around the line. Vuforia has the ability to show you safe spaces. The software can also understand the shape of the machine." Emulate 3D software can run a digital factory on a large screen, all controlled by ControlLogix control systems. The Odos Imaging Star Form Swift 3D camera, acquired by Rockwell Automation in late 2017, is used to detect product presence and height. Pritchard said: "Odos Imaging performs a 3D sensor integrity check. We see this as an exciting new technology that can be used in multiple applications in the production of packaged products for consumers" The aforementioned technologies are actually being used, Pritchard said, adding that Cama, an Italian packaging equipment manufacturer, is actually starting to implement this scenario in real life.

Project efficiency

From a project perspective, the ability to test control code in a virtual environment is one of the biggest advantages of digitalization, Pritchard said: "Since you write the actual control code and use it in the automation of virtual machines, you don't need to debug when you come to the field to deploy it. You have already written and debugged the code. You plug it in and you run it." Typical running times, which normally take 6 to 8 weeks, can be reduced to two weeks with this approach, Pritchard said, adding that the rest of the time is expensive and inconvenient. "This is also a time when the pressure is high, because everyone wants the plant to run smoothly," Pritchard said. The Rockwell Automation team continues to collect requests for future enhancements and hosted over 50 sessions with customers during the Automation Fair. Pritchard said that highly successful results will be achieved with the software: "We also show that our engineers who created our ControlLogix processors by proceeding on a physical and digital theme started to use AI - with the deep neural network method - to analyze and improve the production outputs of production lines. They have the ability to analyze early the likelihood that a product will pass quality control testing in the production process. They had a 90 percent success rate of predicting that in one day." Two other important presentations on display at the innovation booth were voice control and facial recognition. Pritchard says it offers different ways to interface with the automation it has: "The sound-controlled light tower uses an LED technology, meaning it can burn in any color and in a constant, intermittent or rotating way. You need to configure this for each slice. If you have 20 required for your configuration, you can do all of them at the same time." "We also have a new facial recognition feature for the Thin Manager software," Pritchard continues, "and as time goes on, when you log in, it learns what you look like. It automatically recognizes you, enters your information, and in this way, you save time while increasing security."