Industrial Automation is single-handedly changing the way we produce and with new advancements taking place every year, this innovation shows no signs of stopping any time soon. This disruptive pace of progress is unleashing new possibilities and redefining traditional business practices.
The future is certainly bright and knowing what’s coming can help us plan better and update our manufacturing workflows for the newer, faster, better machines being produced.
Here are four incredible advancements happening in industrial automation right now and becoming an early adopter of these new frameworks may be the difference between you becoming a market leader or a follower.
1. More Capable Machines
Humans can never match the dexterity and ability of robots. Whether it’s lifting extremely heavy loads or intricately placing components on a motherboard, machines usually outperform humans, and the future will only make this advantage bigger.
Advanced sensors, improved mechanics, and new spatial recognition software will enable robots to carry out current manufacturing processes to a greater degree of speed, accuracy, and quality. These new sensors and optics will also help pioneer new, innovative production methods as the gap between what is possible and what isn’t gets shorter and shorter.
2. Artificial Intelligence
This ties into the previous point of machines getting smarter and more capable as the years go by. Artificial intelligence refers to the ability of machines or robots to perform tasks associated with intelligent beings. The most common examples of this are decision making scenarios and predicting what to do next.
There is a huge amount of development happening in the artificial intelligence space already in mobile phones, operating systems, and self-driving cars and industrial automation is the only logical next evolution of this phase. Having robots capable of making intelligent, accurate decisions may not just be a pipedream in the future.
On paper at least, machines would make better decision-makers than humans as they can assess millions of gigabytes of data in a second and can give a more informed view on a particular situation. This is especially important for safety metrics like radiation or predicting potentially lethal locations.
Advanced AI would also enable robots to learn on the go and constantly update their processes and software depending on the task at hand. A fully automated factory with little or no workers would be the result of this. Regardless of your opinions on AI and whether machines should control everything we do in our lives, the future is still exciting, and the possibilities are quite literally endless.
3. Collaborative Robots
Humans and robots working together to propel us into the future seems like the dream scenario and with collaborative robots (Cobots), it’s quickly turning into a reality. Cobots are designed to share workspaces with humans and make automation easy for businesses of any size. Cobots are usually controlled by humans and act as a projection or extension of a human limb.
Not all Cobots are created like this but their basic intent is to perform the dirty, dangerous, and dull jobs that humans either can’t do or are inefficient at. Cobots are also easy to store, recalibrate, and can be deployed for multiple applications with no hindrance to your current workflows.
One of the biggest advantages of Cobots is their easy to program software and fast setup. They can be used by businesses of any size or makeup and the advancements being made in their dexterity and fluidity means that Cobots could become an indispensable part of manufacturing processes all over the world.
4. Cheaper Machines
A slightly less exciting but incredibly impactful stage of the future of industrial automation is the fact that robots and manufacturing machines will become more affordable. As humans produce and evolve something for a long time, we become better at producing it at a higher volume, higher quality, and a lower price. We can find examples of this everywhere in our lives. Our appliances, our mobile phones, and televisions have all gotten cheaper and more accessible especially for people in less developed countries.
Let’s take India as an example. Usage of industrial robotics has increased tenfold in the country, for one simple reason: The technology has gotten much cheaper. With more and businesses using it, the companies making the robots can continue to innovate and change their design and functionality as they now have a larger customer base to take feedback from.
The apex of any technology only arrives when it’s used extensively by a large number of people. Only operating in niche factories would hinder the robotics industry as their hyper-specific clientele would never be able to give them the critique and feedback a more general customer base would be able to.
As demand for a product grows, more and more producers enter the market to meet this demand. Competition creates cheaper prices, better products, and more innovation.
There are many more obscure developments happening all the time in the engineering and technology field, but the above examples highlight industrial automation improvements happening across the board and at a very rapid pace.
The future is certainly bright for industrial automation as the line between the world of today and the world of the future becomes more and more faded.
If industrial automation technology companies have customers that are interested in joining the revolution and need financing for their next automation equipment upgrade through a third-party vendor, contact Dimension Funding. Their customers are only an online application and a quick approval process away from getting a time-tested, hassle-free, and convenient financing option for their next automation upgrade.
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