Since the publication of "made in China 2025" nearly a year ago, the concept level has been colorful. From industry 4.0, industrial informatization to intelligent manufacturing and unmanned factory, it has now extended to such hot fields as unmanned cars, unmanned ships and unmanned medical equipment. It seems that the era of intelligent and unmanned industry is near at hand.
Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei Technology, has made an objective judgment. He believes that this is the era of artificial intelligence. First of all, industrial automation should be emphasized. After industrial automation, it is possible to enter information technology. Only after informatization can intelligence be realized. China's industry has not yet completed automation, and many industries can not even achieve semi automation.
Therefore, it is necessary to understand the historical origin, technical origin and economic significance of relevant concepts before exploring industry 4.0 and industrial unmanned.
Automation is the prelude to intelligence
In the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry was worried about being overwhelmed by Japanese competitors. In Detroit, a lot of people are looking to beat their rivals with "lights out production.". "Lamp out production" is a highly automated factory, with the lights off and robots making their own cars. At that time, this idea was impractical. The competitive advantage of Japanese automobile enterprises in those years was not automatic production, but "lean production" technology, which in most cases depended on human resources.
Nowadays, the progress of automation technology has made the "lamp out production" gradually become a reality. Fanuc, a Japanese robot maker, has been able to leave some of its production lines unattended and run automatically for weeks.
Aiming to dominate the world, Volkswagen has developed a new production strategy: modular lateral moment. Volkswagen wants to use this new technology to produce all models of cars on the same production line. This process will eventually allow VW's factories around the world to adapt to local conditions to produce any model required for the local market.
Many years ago, Qian Xuesen once said: "as long as the automatic control is well done, even if the components are poor, the missile can also hit the sky."
Nowadays, automation will imitate human intelligence to a great extent. Robots have been applied in the fields of industrial production, ocean development and space exploration. The expert system has achieved remarkable results in medical diagnosis and geological exploration. Factory automation, office automation, home automation and agricultural automation will become an important part of the new technological revolution, and get rapid development.
On the whole, there is still a big gap between China's traditional industries and the powerful industrial countries in terms of technical equipment, energy and raw material consumption, product quality and management level, etc., especially the gap in technical equipment (such as high-end CNC machine tools) tends to expand. The country can't afford to renew the equipment in a large scale; to maintain the status quo of the equipment, the consequences will be unimaginable. Only by applying automation technology to transform traditional industries can we improve the quality of enterprises most effectively.