Background

As the smart manufacturing policies of countries around the world to be executed in depth, plans such as Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet and Made in China 2025 have been put into effect, good news for the smart manufacturing industry continues to come. With the impact of the global epidemic in 2020, the entire manufacturing industry is more and more limited by human factors, but more and more benefit from intelligence factors. The increasing market demand has accelerated the promotion of manufacturing. As a key link of intelligent manufacturing, edge computing has become more and more important.

The edge computing can bring the following benefits to factory operators:

ü  real-time perception of environmental risks

ü  real-time monitoring of the production process

ü  real-time display of operational data

ü  reducing risks in the production process

ü  improving production efficiency

ü  optimizing manufacturing costs

Relevant technologies

Bring powerful computing technology to new places with revolutionary Intel CPU products. With the right performance, cost, and power efficiency at every node, you can scale edge computing technology across your data. Intel products and technology including the Intel CPU, TSN accelerate the capabilities of IoT systems and deep learning inference where you need it - from the edge to the cloud. This gives you insights at the right place and time, so you can make decisions faster and implement new operational strategies to drive immediate results

The deep learning deployment of the Intel OpenVINO tool suite optimizes the trained model, performs inference analysis, and provides an API for applications to send data to the inference engine. With the optimization of the OpenVINO, the inference performance will be significantly improved, and the benchmark results will be significantly improved.

The OpenVino SDK is a toolkit launched by Intel specifically to simplify deep learning development. It can help developers deploy trained models to the target platform for inference. One of the benefits of OpenVINO is that it can write a program and then choose to run on various Intel hardware based on the workload. For example, the same deep learning model can run on Intel Xeon, Atom, Core and other processors.

The Intel® Sky Lake& Kaby Lake delivers high processing performance at low TDP for this highly integrated Fanless Embedded computer with high reliability, ultracompact size design, remote management and end-to-end security.

The Intel® Ethernet Controller provides an ideal GbE solution for customers looking for a full-featured Gigabit Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical-Layer (PHY) solution. With support for advanced features such as 802.1AS Precision Time Stamping, ECC Packet Buffers and Integrated Non-Volatile Memory, the Intel® Ethernet Controller provides an ideal GbE solution for Desktop, Consumer Electronics, and other small form-factor Embedded Applications.

Solution

You can use the industrial PC made by Future Robot Tech to help intelligent manufacturing users quickly build an edge computing platform close to the data source of the IoT devices, conduct real-time data collection and analysis, establish virtual data models, perceive the risks and environmental changes of the production process in time, optimize equipment energy consumption requirements, improve production efficiency and reduce production costs. Factory users use sensors, industrial cameras and end-side IPC for local data collection, through edge computing smart gateways for data interaction, edge-side IPC for data filtering, cleaning and other real-time processing. The edge computing platform running on TSN(time sensitive network) can ensure the immediacy of data interaction. The factory can also try to use virtualization technology software modeling to realize an industrial controller, and issue instructions through the edge-side platform to control the production line site.

Relying on this set of edge computing platform, users of this factory can analyze the results of data in real time based on edge computing, so that the manufacturing process can respond and change more quickly, such as automatic power-off before the machine overheats, more reasonable allocation of machines and the pretreatment of welding quality. Which greatly reduces the hidden dangers in the production process and manufacturing costs.

Figure 1. E521 series Highly Expandable Fanless IPC. (Source: Future Robot Technology Co., Limited)

The E521 highly expandable fanless industrial computer can use desktop CPUs to give customers more choice in allocating computing resources according to the actual needs of the industrial manufacturing site. It has a 1 x VGA interface and 2 x DP interface, which can support dual 4K independent displays. It has two Intel i211-AT GbE LAN and one Intel i219-LM GbE LAN, supports TSN time-sensitive network, and can meet communication and data acquisition requirements at the same time. 6 data serial ports, including 5 RS232 interfaces and 1 RS485 interface, can meet the various serial communication requirements of the industrial manufacturing site; a total of 8 USB interfaces, including 4 USB3.0 and 4 USB2.0 interfaces, can connect to a variety of USB devices, greatly enhancing the scalability of the host; 1 x USIM can be used for 3G/4G LTE communication to realize convenient wireless network connection. 1 x mSATA interface supports most mainstream mSATA hard disks on the market. Up to 3 SATA3.0 interfaces can realize disk-array and easily realize large-capacity storage. 1 PICe3.0 x16, 1 PCIe2.0 x2 with 1 full-size Mini-PCIe interface, it is convenient to expand more external devices, and the rugged fanless structure design greatly improves the stability and service life of the device. E521 also comes with a wall mount kit, which makes the installation of the device easier and more convenient.

Future Robot Technology Co., Limited (Future Robot in short) is a high-tech innovation enterprise focusing on Intelligent Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence. Future Robot, with strong R&D capability and market demand-orientation, design and provide worldwide enterprises and individual users with embedded products which are for Industrial Automation, Robot, Machine Vision, Medical Application, Intelligent Transportation, Education and Internet of Things applications.

Expert team with rich experiences in Machine Vision, Motion Control and Edge Computing:

Hardware engineering team

- x86, FPGA, DSP, Layout and testing Engineers

Software engineering team

- BIOS engineers, FPGA, DSP, Algorithm software engineers and system development engineers.

Industrial and structure design engineering team

- structure design, multi board and model design

As a member of Intel IoT Solutions Alliance and partner of Intel IoT RFP Ready Kits, Future Robot Technology Co., Limited aim to provide reliable, high efficient and cost-effective standard and customized solutions for the customers worldwide.