Making digitalisation and Industry 4.0 a physical reality
30 June 2020
Making the virtual world a reality; Festo has developed the Productivity Master, a machine to demonstrate the benefits of digitalisation in manufacturing.
The global manufacturing industry spends a great deal of time and effort discussing digitalisation and how it will affect production of the future. Many of the ideas and principles remain abstract, with very few ‘real’ Industry 4.0 factories inexistence. As a result, it is often difficult to portray the many facets of digitalisation in manufacturing in one place.
The need to give assurance to procurement teams and the C-suite that their investment in Industry 4.0 and digitalisation is not just a leap of faith but a sound business decision is a practical dilemma for many an engineer or operations manager. Festo has taken steps to address this problem. The result is a 5m long production line, named ‘The Productivity Master’ that attempts to bring often abstract ideas into reality.
First thoughts
The original idea was to produce a single machine, showing a real production environment and all the elements of connectivity from the workpiece to the cloud. This included a full range of automation equipment, from pneumatic actuators to ball screw drives, from process valves to servo drives, from vision sensors to IoT gateways from the Festo portfolio. We felt this equipped us well to draw together the diverse strands of digitalisation and Industry 4.0 ways of working.
We also recognised that the types of products and technologies on display would be important to create a palpable link to machines found in the market today. However, the objective of the Productivity Master is not to focus on any single product from Festo but to showcase the Industry 4.0 technology and connectivity capability. So, not only should the machine explain the seamless connectivity needed to meet the needs of the future factory, it should also reach into the cloud and explore the world of digital twins, multiple communication networking, big data and online cloud diagnostics.
Making it real
While the factory of the future will stretch the boundaries of connectivity, big data, virtual commissioning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), what will not change much is the way factories will make or assemble products. So, we chose a demonstration application which contains representative tasks that are easily transferred into other industrial applications.
The Productivity Master takes blank USB memory sticks from typical cassettes and prints and places labels on both sides of the stick. It then loads a custom set of data on the stick and distributes the stick to the recipient from its buffer storage location. Many typical machine functions can be seen throughout the process, such as:
• Pick and place
• Component flipping
• Rotation functions
• Rotary table control
• Vacuum and gripper handling
• Typical label printing and placement
• Magazine indexing
• Storage location logging
• Vision sensing
• Orientation checking and placement
• Component transfer
With cloud connectivity, the Productivity Master is an ideal showcase to demonstrate the advantages of the virtual world on a physical machine. The machine operates a fully automated ‘lot size one’ process, allowing orders for USB memory sticks to be fulfilled online from anywhere in the world, producing a customised QR code for the personalised stick. The user can then redeem their order from the cloud, via the screen or by scanning their QR code on a Festo Vision Sensor on an exhibition stand. The USB stick will then be produced immediately, printed with the users’ personal message, loaded with personalised data and stored, ready to be called off by a second scan of the code.
Productivity Master description
It is 5m long and constructed of five individual cells that can be replaced with different functions. This introduces the challenge of not just communication between automation equipment in a cell, but also the communication between discreet cells. Each cell utilises a Festo CPX-E motion controller as the individual cell control, communicating cyclic data to Festo servo drives, pneumatic valve terminals and sensors via Ether CAT and IO Link. In turn, each cell communicates along the machine using Ethernet, with the final connections using OPC-UA directly to the cloud via the Festo IoT gateway.
Motion in modern automation is provided by both electrical and pneumatic means. The Productivity Master represents this mix with low voltage and extra low voltage drives, seamlessly working closely with traditional valve terminals and the innovative intelligent pneumatic Motion Terminal from Festo, the VTEM. In all aspects of automation, the choice of technology is seamless from both pneumatic and electric grippers to ball screw and pneumatic mini slide systems.
Man and machine
Like the real Festo factory in Scharnhausen, Germany, the Productivity Master utilises the latest digital maintenance manager for production managers and system operators. Smartenance from Festo provides the maintenance engineers with a clear schedule and evaluation for the Productivity Master’s maintenance and offers a fast and easy transition to digital maintenance.
The system consists of two parts; a mobile maintenance schedule in the form of an app for smartphones and tablets on the shop floor, and a web browser interface for managing and documenting the maintenance tasks in the office. Smartenance is quick and easy for anyone to install, self-explanatory and a simple and cost-effective introduction to digitalisation.
The Productivity Master also takes advantage of the Festo Dashboards in the cloud. The CPX automation platform, pneumatic service units and servo drives are all connected to the virtual world via the IoT gateway. Operators can immediately gain access to the most important data generated by the machine: such as temperature, current and speeds of servos, analogue and digital signals and errors. Air pressure and air consumption can also be monitored, and changes logged, enabling prediction of potential problems in the future. Data can be accessed anywhere in the world and both live and historical data can be viewed without any programming or set up, due to the preconfigured nature of the dashboards.
Conclusion
There is a real need to find ways of making Industry 4.0 and digitalisation concepts far more understandable and accessible if we are to encourage the levels of investment required to equip our factories for the future. Festo’s Productivity Master demonstrates how many different technologies that are already available can be combined to achieve major improvements in automation, operations and maintenance. By bringing typical application examples onto the Productivity Master, Festo aims to make it easier for all those involved in the decision-making process to associate Industry 4.0 and digitalisation to real life and therefore see how future digitalisation principles can be applied to production lines today.
The Productivity Master is a highlight of the Festo virtual fair called ‘Industrial Transformation; Smart. Flexible. Digital’. To see it in action as well as other highlights from the fair then visit www.festo.com/virtualexhibition from 15 July 2020.
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