G Factory on the Road: Starting with Mobile Robots “Autonomously” Traveling in the Workshop

On the road to smart manufacturing, the difficulty in promoting wireless technology in the industrial Internet is one of the pain points.

"In the current industrial production scenarios, wireless technology only accounts for 6% of the industrial Internet, of which Wi-Fi accounts for 3%. Industrial network links are still mainly fieldbus and industrial Ethernet." Dr. Rong Letian of the Shenzhen 5G Industry Alliance Expert Committee pointed out this at a meeting on 5G+Industrial Internet during this year's Shanghai Industrial Expo.

The inability of wireless technology to be widely promoted in the industrial Internet is mainly limited by the capabilities of Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth technologies (such as stability, speed, scalability, etc.). For this reason, many intelligent and industrial applications are difficult to truly implement and promote in workshops. One example is the mobile robot application that has a large demand in industrial production scenarios. The commercial popularization of 5G is expected to directly hit the application pain points in these industrial fields.

5G solves the pain points of industrial logistics, and mobile robots have high growth potential

Take the CNC machining center of a consumer electronics manufacturing plant as an example. The CNC machining center processes tools for Apple mobile phones. There are 11 production lines and nearly 100 Cnc Machine tools in the workshop with an area of ​​nearly 12,000 square meters. But until recently, the factory's material distribution and machine loading and unloading were still using primitive manual operation methods, which not only involved a large amount of manpower and required two shifts day and night, but also often had problems such as chaotic material management, unstable production efficiency, low production yield, and high management costs. This has become a pain point that many traditional manufacturing plants need to solve urgently.

An automated material distribution and loading and unloading system can not only help the factory to complete the material handling task efficiently, accurately and flexibly, but also the handling route HIA can be adjusted in time with the adjustment of the production process, so that more than a dozen products can be manufactured on a production line. For factories under the current background of manufacturing upgrades, it has become a topic that must be faced.

The "mass customization" production model has become a future development trend. To cope with this trend, the improvement of production flexibility and intelligence has become a necessary ability for factories to gain a foothold in the intelligent era.

Among them, flexible, autonomous and automated industrial logistics applications are beginning to be increasingly valued by factories.

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) and AMR (Autonomous Mobile Robot) are gradually moving from the automotive industry to more industries.

It is worth mentioning that as early as the 1970s, AGVs had already been used in automobile assembly lines. In 1974, the Swedish Volvo Kalmar car assembly plant adopted an automatic car assembly line based on AGVS as a carrier, which reduced Volvo's assembly time by 20%, assembly failures by 39%, investment recovery time by 57%, and labor by 5%. As time goes by, AGVs and AMRs have long been widely used in the manufacturing and assembly lines of major automobile factories in the world, such as General Motors, Toyota, Chrysler, Volkswagen and other manufacturers.

However, unlike automobile assembly factories that have achieved high automation very early, the degree of automation in many traditional industrial manufacturing fields is not high. At the same time, the low penetration rate of wireless technology in the industrial Internet has greatly restricted the application of AGVs, AMRs and other applications.

AGV is equipped with an automatic guidance system, which can ensure that the system can automatically travel along the predetermined route without manual navigation, and automatically transport goods or materials from the starting point to the destination; AMR uses sensors and processors to automatically move materials without physical guides or markers, and can make its own reasonable response to various dynamic changes in the environment. Both require a stable, reliable, and low-latency network environment.

With the advent of 5G, the application of AGV and AMR will also truly help factories solve the pain points in industrial logistics scenarios. The application scenarios cover flat warehouse logistics (pallet handling, material box handling, picking and handling, shelf handling) and flexible production logistics (SMT, automatic loading and unloading, mobile workstations, composite collaboration, roller docking). In addition to automobiles, 3C electronics, semiconductors, medical, new energy and other industries will benefit.

At the just-concluded Shanghai Industrial Expo, the "2020 Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Industry Development Blue Book" jointly released by Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII) and Stand Robotics showed that the global mobile robot market size reached 13.95 billion yuan in 2019, a year-on-year increase of 5.68%. Among them, the AGV market size accounted for 63.91%, reaching 8.98 billion yuan; the AMR market size accounted for 36.09%, reaching 5.07 billion yuan. Looking at the Chinese market, the blue book data shows that the scale of China's mobile robot market in 2019 was 2.609 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8.40%. From the perspective of market scale structure, the proportion of AMR is still at a relatively low level. In 2019, the AMR market size was 785 million yuan, accounting for 30.09%. From the perspective of market sales structure, AMR sales accounted for 18.72% in 2019.

(Main scenarios of flexible production logistics, source: Stander, Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII)

Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII) pointed out that the Chinese market has higher growth potential than the global market, especially in the fields of manufacturing and warehousing scenarios. GGII predicts that the average annual compound growth rate of China's mobile robot market size will exceed 23.5% from 2020 to 2025. By 2025, the global mobile robot market size is expected to exceed 9 billion yuan, and the sales volume of mobile robots is expected to exceed 110,000 units.

5G factory upgrades are on the way

As an end-to-end technological revolution, the important value of 5G lies in its ability to empower thousands of industries, and Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet are bound to be 5G To B field is an important scenario.

With the support of 5G, industrial logistics is expected to achieve true full-scenario intelligence, which is an extremely important progress for factories to cope with the future "mass customization" production model and realize intelligent flexible production.

In the CNC machining center case mentioned above, the domestic mobile robot manufacturer Stand Robotics provided it with a set of automated material distribution and loading and unloading systems, including 20 AMRs equipped with double-layer six-station conveyor tables, 11 line-side docks, and integrated 5G capabilities for AMRs, which significantly reduced communication delays and significantly improved stability.

In recent years, operators, communication equipment and service providers, and related hardware and system manufacturers have been actively promoting technologies and solutions related to smart logistics.

Coincidentally, Huawei recently joined hands with China Mobile, Beckhoff China and Huaheng Company to jointly release a 5G full-scenario smart logistics system. In this solution, the low latency and efficient Ether CAT's real-time network communication mechanism can realize the synchronous collaborative operation of multiple standard AGVs, as well as the combined work of AGVs and robots. It has broad application prospects in the fields of intelligent warehousing and material distribution and large workpiece transportation.

The exploration of 5G networks in intelligent warehousing and intelligent manufacturing has just started, and more and more technology giants are gradually joining in. For example, IBM is starting from edge computing practices and proposing its own solutions around 5G factories. According to foreign technology media Light Reading, the company recently built a business unit called "Intelligent Connected Operations" consisting of 3,000 employees, which includes asset and building optimization, manufacturing and Industry 4.0, as well as the Internet of Things and edge computing. In fact, IBM also expects 5G to create new opportunities for the company in the manufacturing field. In July, IBM said it would work with Verizon to bring 5G and edge computing solutions to enterprise customers.

David Meek, a partner in charge of IBM's manufacturing and Industry 4.0 practices, pointed out that at present, dedicated 5G networks are still too expensive for most manufacturers working with IBM, but "5G is definitely on the roadmap of some manufacturers."