Industrial Internet of Things (I-IoT) is reshaping industries and competitive landscapes with factory automation alone a big business with big players. However, there is an elephant in the room: the wiring that is required to fulfill that vision. A typical factory is equipped with untold kilometers of cables and wires. These wires pose many problems and constraints, from simple inconvenience, to maintenance difficulty, performance limitations and safety issues.
Some typical examples of such scenarios (and pain points):
1: In the Food & Beverage industry, wires are a substantial source for contamination and wired solutions are very expensive to implement.
2: In dynamic (rotating, moving, mobile) installations or harsh environments, wires tend to break and stall the operation frequently, thus adding downtime and loss of productivity.
3: In some applications, the cost and complexity of wiring is substantial and moreover is not flexible to frequent changes required in the production line.
4: Every industrial robot carries a braid of wires (electricity & communication) that are essential to its operation. These wires can stick, break, bump and drag people and objects, in addition to limiting the robot’s travel distance.
5: Automated clamping systems, such that are used in milling stations in factories around the world, are not intelligent. They require careful human supervision to make sure that the system is properly aligned before milling. Deviations can cause damages and loss of assembly parts, or worse - damage production equipment
6: In many cases, adding physical wires to a system is not viable, and hence systems integrators are limited in their capacity to make their systems more intelligent.
Smart manufacturing is the new frontier for innovation, with I-IoT and augmented reality redefining manufacturing: lowering costs, increasing operational performance, reducing downtime and increasing asset utilisation, all whilst improving safety and compliance and increasing flexibility and agility.
The European Commission has set a path to digitise European Industry as it recognises that European manufacturing is strategic and important to maintain competitiveness.
The overall objective of the project is to perform feasibility study on the business and market opportunities for CoreTigo. Namely the result of the project is a report containing the following structure: Primary Market Research, Technical Feasibility Study, and Business planning.
