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Manufacturing process innovation starting with digitization

This article is recommended for those who

  • Those who are considering and introducing data collection and utilization of factory equipment
  • For those interested in Macnica 's data collection solutions

How long does it take to finish reading this article

3 minutes

Introduction

Hello! My name is Sakuraba from Macnica Solution Development Department.

The era of Reiwa has begun. I'm still not familiar with the new era name, but I'm wondering if the day will come when people born in Reiwa will play an active role.

I was born in the Heisei era, and this article is about building a demo environment for our data collection solution for factory equipment using a factory demo machine.

This is the first time, and we are planning a total of 5 serializations.

Factory demo machine, purchase

This time, we purchased equipment that imitates a factory (see image below).

This equipment is like an educational toy for training industrial engineers, and it is said that PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) can be learned efficiently, so it can be used as a demo environment for our data collection solution. I thought about it and decided to purchase it.

We plan to use this equipment as a factory and incorporate our data collection solution, so we hope that it will help you visualize what the solution we provide will be like.

By the way, the demo machine I purchased this time is divided into the following four areas for each function, and basically materials are moved in order from [1]. (The material is actually like a building block.)

  1. Warehouse: This is the part that stores materials, and can store a total of 9 materials.
  2. Conveying department: Transports materials when moving from the warehouse department to the processing department.
  3. Processing department: Processing (assuming heat treatment processing and polishing processing) is performed on the conveyed material.
  4. Identification department: The processed material is transported to the inspection equipment, where it is color-identified and sorted by color.

Let's start operation!

The introduction has become too long. Let's see it in action!

Turn on the power and start driving!

…………

…………

…………Gagaga, gurguru guru, gagaga…………

…………

The robots started to move while making a terrible sound, but if you look closely, it seems that they are not carrying materials well in the warehouse department.

Apparently, the warehouse in the warehouse department is distorted, and the transport robot seems to be unable to pick up the materials well.
In addition, there were parts of the transfer robot in the transfer part that were loose, and there were parts where the drive parts were not slippery, making the operation unstable.

Therefore, we attached an acrylic board to the warehouse part so that the warehouse would not be distorted. I also fixed the loose parts with a fryer and greased the drive parts to make them slide better.

With this, I managed to get it to work (see video below).

Towards data collection, the cornerstone of smart factories

There are various points of view when it comes to making a smart factory, and there may be differences of opinion as to what should be emphasized.
We believe that "collecting data" is important.

We use AI technology and IoT technology to solve the problems of our customers, mainly in the manufacturing industry.

However, simply accumulating a large amount of data is meaningless, and we believe that meaningful "effective data" is necessary in order to connect it to analysis using AI and improvement activities based on data. increase.

Using this demo machine, we plan to collect data from the PLC next time, and eventually build a demo environment that will allow you to imagine our solutions, including the utilization of that data.

In addition, the content of our solution is described on the following page, so please check it together with this article.

 

Related article

*Tech blog*
I tried turning a small Macnica factory into a smart factory Part 2

*Tech Blog*
Trying out a smart factory at a small Macnica factory: Part 3

*Tech Blog*
We tried turning a small Macnica factory into a smart factory. Part 4

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