Production Line Speed is Concrete

This week's digest includes green concrete, deepwater drilling achievements, controller for humanoids, warehouse automation, sub-bottleneck detection methods, and GenAI for industrial applications.

Nov 03, 2024

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Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

🏗️ The AI Boom Rests on Billions of Tonnes of Concrete

✍️ Author: Ted C. Fishman
🏢 Organizations: DataBank, Holcim

Concrete is not just a major ingredient in data centers and the power plants being built to energize them. As the world’s most widely manufactured material, concrete—and especially the cement within it—is also a major contributor to climate change, accounting for around 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Data centers use so much concrete that the construction boom is wrecking tech giants’ commitments to eliminate their carbon emissions.

At the construction site for ATL4, I’m met by Tony Qoori, the company’s big, friendly, straight-talking head of construction. He says that this giant building and four others DataBank has recently built or is planning in the Atlanta area will together add 133,000 square meters (1.44 million square feet) of floor space. They all follow a universal template that Qoori developed to optimize the construction of the company’s ever-larger centers. At each site, trucks haul in more than a thousand prefabricated concrete pieces: wall panels, columns, and other structural elements. Workers quickly assemble the precision-measured parts. Hundreds of electricians swarm the building to wire it up in just a few days. Speed is crucial when construction delays can mean losing ground in the AI battle.

Yet change is afoot. When I visited the innovation center operated by the Swiss materials giant Holcim, in Lyon, France, research executives told me about the database they’ve assembled of nearly 1,000 companies working to decarbonize cement and concrete. None yet has enough traction to measurably reduce global concrete emissions. But the innovators hope that the boom in data centers—and in associated infrastructure such as new nuclear reactors andoffshore wind farms, where each turbine foundation can use up to 7,500 cubic meters of concrete—may finally push green cement and concrete beyond labs, startups, and pilot plants.

China accounts for more than half of the concrete produced and used in the world, but companies there are hard to track. Outside of China, the top three multinational cement producers—Holcim, Heidelberg Materials in Germany, and Cemex in Mexico—have launched pilot programs to snare CO2 emissions before they escape and then bury the waste deep underground. To do that, they’re taking carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology already used in the oil and gas industry and bolting it onto their cement plants.

🛢️🔋 CNBC joins Chevron CEO in Gulf of Mexico to discuss deepwater achievements

🏢 Organizations: Chevron

More news in energy:

CATL executives on hybrid vehicles, sodium-ion batteries, and more

🤖 Atlas Goes Hands On

🏢 Organizations: Boston Dynamics

More news in humanoids:

⚙️ Pentzold: Precision and Innovation for a Competitive Edge

More news in automation:

Brightpick’s world’s most advanced robotic warehouse
Life-Saving Vehicles Made with GrayMatter’s AI Robotics
Floatic and Geek+ Form Strategic Partnership to Deliver Integrated Robotics Solutions for Warehouse Automation

Hardware Meets SaaS

↔️ I3oT (Industrializable Industrial Internet of Things) Tool for Continuous Improvement in Production Line Efficiency by Means of Sub-Bottleneck Detection Method

✍️ Authors: Javier Llopis, Antonio Lacasa, Nicolás Montés
🏢 Organizations: Ford, CEU Cardinal Herrera University

The present paper shows how to develop an I3oT (Industrializable Industrial Internet of Things) tool for continuous improvement in production line efficiency by means of the sub-bottleneck detection method. There is a large amount of scientific literature related to the detection of bottlenecks in production lines. However, there is no scientific literature that develops tools to improve production lines based on the bottlenecks that go beyond rebalancing tasks. This article explores the concept of a sub-bottleneck. In order to detect sub-bottlenecks in a massive way, the use of one of the I3oT (Industrializable Industrial Internet of Things) tools developed in our previous work, the mini-terms, is proposed. These mini-terms use the existing sensors for the normal operation of the production lines to measure the sub-cycle times and use them to predict the deterioration of the machine components found in the production lines. The sub-bottleneck algorithms proposed are used in two real twin lines at the Ford manufacturing plant in Almussafes (Valencia), the (3LH) and (3RH), to show how the lines can be continuously improved by means of sub-bottleneck detection.

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

💿 Nordson Electronics Solutions Wins Global Technology Award for the ASYMTEK Select Coat SL-1040 Conformal Coating System

🏭 Vertical: Computer and Electronic
🏢 Organizations: Nordson

Nordson Electronics Solutions, a global leader in reliable electronics manufacturing technologies, has received the Global Technology award for the ASYMTEK Select Coat® SL-1040 Conformal Coating system. This prestigious award recognizes the best new innovations for conformal coating equipment, which are used in printed circuit assembly and the advanced packaging industries.

The new SL-1040 system pairs new process control and innovative maintenance features using the new ASYMTEK SC-450 PreciseCoat® Jet and enhanced EasyCoat® software. A novel ultrasonic cleaner simplifies nozzle cleaning to improve uptime, yield, and cost of ownership. Dual and triple applicators maximize throughput, while flexible features drive better yields through efficient changeover, traceability, and set-up consistency.

Yokogawa Releases OpreX Batch MES

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces the global release of OpreX Batch MES, a product in the OpreX™ Asset Operations and Optimization family. OpreX Batch MES is a manufacturing execution system (MES) package intended for use in batch plants that produce specialty and fine chemicals.

🦾 OSARO Unveils AutoModel: AI-Powered Order Fulfillment Robots Adapt to New Products in Real Time

🔖 Topics: Foundation Model
🏢 Organizations: OSARO

OSARO®, a global leader in machine-learning-enabled robotics for high-volume fulfillment centers, has launched OSARO AutoModel™. This marks a significant advancement in its OSARO SightWorks™ perception platform. In order fulfillment, where speed is critical, businesses often face days or even weeks of costly downtime to update their robots for new SKUs. In contrast, OSARO AutoModel enables robots to automatically learn and adapt to new items, processes, and workflows with zero downtime. OSARO AutoModel accelerates the introduction and onboarding of new SKUs and increases robot productivity, allowing for greater flexibility and efficiency in kitting, piece-picking, and autobagging.

Business Transactions

This week's top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🚘 Investing to bring the Waymo Driver to more riders

🏢 Organizations: Waymo

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve closed an oversubscribed investment round of $5.6 billion, led by Alphabet, with continued participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price. With this latest investment, we will continue to welcome more riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and Atlanta through our expanded partnership with Uber. We’ll also continue advancing the Waymo Driver — our AI-powered autonomous driving system — to support a variety of business applications over time.

🧠 Third Wave Automation Closes $27 Million Series C Funding to Scale Autonomous Forklifts

🏢 Organizations: Third Wave Automation, Woven Capital, Toyota

Third Wave Automation, provider of autonomous high-reach forklifts powered by Shared Autonomy, closed a $27 million Series C round led by Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth fund. Return investors Innovation Endeavors, Norwest Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures joined the round, bringing total capital raised to $97 million. The funding will enable Third Wave to scale its pioneering Shared Autonomy Platform, expand manufacturing of its multimode TWA Reach forklifts, and support future technology development that advances the use of autonomous forklifts in and around warehouse environments.

Third Wave Automation pioneered materials handling automation with its Shared Autonomy Platform, enabling the TWA Reach line of forklifts to operate autonomously or seek help from remote operators who can take control from the safety of their office. The platform uses machine learning to ensure forklifts continue to adapt and improve over time. The TWA Reach forklifts operate in four modes: fully autonomous, remote assist, remote operation and traditional manual operation. They are designed for high-reach applications, capable of horizontal and vertical movement of payloads, and used for end-to-end applications, from inbound, replenish and outbound tasks to all tasks in between.

📷 How Advex creates synthetic data to improve machine vision for manufacturers

✍️ Author: Paul Sawers
🏢 Organizations: Advex AI, Construct Capital

Advex’s formal launch at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 has already secured a handful of customers through its stealth phase. This includes what it calls “seven major” enterprise clients, which it says it’s not at liberty to disclose. TechCrunch can also reveal that the San Francisco-based startup has raised $3.6 million in funding, the bulk of which came via a $3.1 million seed tranche last December, with notable backers including Construct Capital, Pear VC, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.

Potential customers include legacy developers of machine vision systems, along the lines of Cognex or Keyence, which are striving to bolster their products with better AI. But on the other side, Advex might sell directly to the end-user businesses, such as car manufacturers or logistics companies building their own in-house tooling. But the real secret sauce is in the company’s proprietary diffusion model, similar to something like Midjourney or Dall-E, and is what’s used to create the synthetic data. “That one is custom, and is highly complicated — that’s where we put all of our effort,” Pachuca added.

🚘 NTT and Toyota Motor Corporation agree to joint initiative in the field of mobility and AI/telecommunications with the aim of realizing a society with zero traffic accidents

🏢 Organizations: NTT Group, Toyota

Toyota Motor Corporation and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation have agreed to a joint initiative in the field of mobility and AI/telecommunications with the aim of realizing a society with zero traffic accidents.

Toyota is developing Software Defined Vehicles (SDV) with safety and security as the top priority. Alongside the evolution of SDV, it will become more important to build infrastructure such as a high-speed, high-quality communication infrastructure, an AI infrastructure that can collect and intelligently process vast amounts of information, and a computing infrastructure.

In this collaboration, NTT, whose strengths lie in the telecommunications, and Toyota will jointly build a “Mobility AI Platform” that combines a seamless communications infrastructure with AI and computing platforms that can intelligently process large amounts of data. By doing so, they aim to connect people, mobility, and infrastructure to realize a safe, secure, and sustainable mobility society with no traffic accidents.

🤝 Siemens strengthens leadership in industrial software and AI with the acquisition of Altair Engineering

🏢 Organizations: Siemens, Altair

Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire Altair Engineering Inc., a leading provider of software in the industrial simulation and analysis market. Altair shareholders will receive USD 113 per share, representing an enterprise value of approximately USD 10 billion. The offer price represents a 19% premium to Altair’s unaffected closing price on October 21, 2024, the last trading day prior to media reports regarding a possible transaction. With this acquisition Siemens strengthens its position as a leading technology company and its leadership in industrial software.

By adding Altair’s highly complementary simulation portfolio, with strength in mechanical and electromagnetic capabilities, we are enhancing our comprehensive Digital Twin to deliver a full-suite, physics-based, simulation portfolio as part of Siemens Xcelerator. Altair’s data science and AI-powered simulation capabilities allow anyone, from engineers to generalists, to access simulation expertise to decrease time-to-market and accelerate design iterations. Additionally, Altair’s data science capabilities will unlock Siemens’ industrial domain expertise in product lifecycle and manufacturing processes.

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