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Industry 4.0

AI-powered Computer Vision Revolutionizing Multiple Industries

Categories
Industry 4.0

AI-powered Computer Vision Revolutionizing Multiple Industries

Inspections are critical for attaining manufacturing excellence. Inspection of processes and products determine the business success and customer confidence in the brand. Companies are increasingly relying on next-generation inspection solutions to improve quality control and deliver defect-free products. 

AI-powered Computer Vision

Digitization and machine vision based on AI algorithms can identify manufacturing anomalies much faster than human inspectors and improve quality and reduce costs. It employs computer vision, a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers and systems to obtain useful insight from digital images, videos, and other visual inputs — and take actions or make recommendations.

AI-backed computer vision is finding applications in industries ranging from manufacturing to automotive – and the market is expanding rapidly. It can perform the functions like inspection and identification in much less time. By the use of cameras, data, and algorithms, a system can be trained to inspect products or watch a production asset and analyze a very wide range of products or processes and detect invisible defects at a rate exceeding human capabilities.

Deep learning, an aspect of machine learning technology, trains machines by feeding a neural network with examples of labeled data. This is used to identify common patterns based on these examples and then convert it into a ‘math equation’ that mimics a human visual inspection classifies forthcoming information and performs tasks like differentiating parts, abnormalities, and texture.

Use Cases:

Automatic Counting: Computer Vision can be used for counting applications in industries where small parts are manufactured in large numbers like in metal parts, foods, pharmaceuticals, food, rubber pieces, wooden products, jewelry, etc.

Detect absence/presence: Computer vision can also detect the absence and presence of something such as date print, tags, brand logos, codes, stamps, etc, and automatically confirm the completeness of the product.

Sorting: Vision systems powered by AI algorithms can identify the right and defective product types by imaging them at high speeds. For example, separating pills in the pharma industry and segregating broken and damaged items in jewelry. This can be followed by sorting the identified items into chosen categories.

Surface Inspection: Computer Vision can identify surface anomalies for example scratches, dents, and pits accurately and at a high speed. Defects in some products like fabrics or automobile bodies are very small and undistinguishable, which can be detected only by monitoring the variation in intensity using deep learning algorithms.

Application:

Machine Vision is powering Industrial Automation. Using the latest 2D, 3D, and Artificial Intelligence solutions inspection systems are used across various industries like the pharmaceutical industry, automotive industry, printing and packaging industry, food and beverage industry, and textile industry. It offers huge benefits in eliminating human interventions and errors thus cutting down heavily on inspection cost and time.

There are startups working on this solution helping the above-mentioned as well as other sectors to greatly enhance their functioning through the acceptance and integration of new technologies into their existing systems. To know more about these and for collaboration and partnership opportunities please write to us at open-innovator@quotients.com

Categories
Applied Innovation Industry 4.0

No Code RTLS Platform can enhance Safety and Productivity

Categories
Applied Innovation Industry 4.0

No Code RTLS Platform can enhance Safety and Productivity

RTLS or Real-time locating systems are used to determine an item or person’s location accurately. RTLS, rather than a specific technology, is a collection of methods for locating and managing assets. These systems generate location data and depending on the application the collected data can be used for employee tracking and high-value asset tracking in industries such as manufacturing, mining, healthcare, etc. The components of RTLS consist of a transponder, a receiver, and software to interpret each data. Due to the increasing focus on industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, and technological advancements such as IoT, the demand for RTLS is soaring.

Location Data Ensuring Visibility


Location is also a key element in a comprehensive IoT solution that can have a significant impact on the revenues of any company. It can give businesses complete visibility into their operations, from the movement of people to the monitoring of assets. The analysis of this data can help an organization to derive valuable insights which can lead to more informed decision-making, optimization of processes, and streamlined costs.

Supply Chain Management

Timing is very crucial in the supply chain, location data can make the value chain completely visible to decision-makers helping them streamline operations and increase productivity. This also can ensure predictive analytics to refine performance and boost productivity by identifying lag time and areas for improvement. It can also bring down the operating costs with detailed and optimal transportation routes.

RTLS through data of the assets can help in optimal use and inventory stocking. With this, it enables better asset tracking, and material handling systems, reducing accidents and asset losses. Multiple activities can be monitored at once — supply chain, warehousing, transportation, etc so it can thus streamline processes and increase customer satisfaction.

Manufacturing

In Manufacturing Industry, workers’ data on their location and wearable sensors collect data about their health parameters that can be analyzed against standard parameters to predict behavior patterns and improve their productivity along with preventing workers’ injuries and ensuring safety. With this, by leveraging location data with IoT data, manufacturers can better sense the manufacturing and supply chain processes, improve demand forecasting, and achieve faster time to market.

Healthcare

In the Healthcare industry, RTLS through data collection on medical equipment location and usage and staff and patient interactions can ensure compliance reporting by gathering important data. RTLS data if integrated with other sources like electronic health records and maintenance management systems can be used to give comprehensive information across the healthcare enterprise leading to improvements for healthcare facilities and their patients.

No-Code/ Low Code RTLS Platform

There are some hurdles in the implementation of RTLS in any organization. Apart from the leadership hurdle, some enterprises focus on certain aspects more heavily than others. In this respect, the No-Code/ Low Code RTLS Platform is a programming platform that enables non-technical users to build applications by visual development interface and, dragging and dropping software applications. Such modular and configurable solutions can give flexibility to organizations to configure their rules and alerts according to their requirement and also lead to quick deployment.

Quotients is also engaged with matured startups that are working on this solution helping the above-mentioned as well as other sectors to greatly enhance their functioning through the acceptance and integration of new technologies into their existing systems. To know more about these and for collaboration and partnership opportunities please write to us at open-innovator@quotients.com

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Innovator's Vista

Pulsed Wi-Fi Technology to Mitigate Air Pollution.

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Innovator's Vista

Pulsed Wi-Fi Technology to Mitigate Air Pollution.

Air pollution and climate change are issues that transcend national boundaries. Exposure to high levels of air pollution adversely effects Millions of people around the world. Both short and long term exposure to air pollutants can cause a variety of health issues like respiratory infections, heart disease and lung cancer. It has forced people to take keener interest in the level of pollution in their localities.

Developments in technology are being used for improving air quality.  Devices like catalytic converters are being used that catalyzes a redox reaction that transforms dangerous air pollutants into less-harmful pollutants. Scrubbers are another pollution control device that remove air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen chloride from industrial exhaust. 

A Bengaluru based startup, Devic Earth, has come up with an air pollution control system that uses pulsed Wi-Fi technology to tackle airborne gaseous and particle pollutants in industrial complexes, homes and cities.

The air pollution control system, Pure Skies, is a plug-and-play system that, as claimed by the company, improves air quality by 33-90% over large areas. It just requires pushing a button that removes 40-50 % of nano-sized particles at <20µm, including PM2.5 and PM10 from the air.

The system consists of custom-made omnidirectional antenna, an IoT hardware system and Power Source. The technology is backed by 10 years of research and uses pulsed wi-fi which is very similar to wi-fi at home. It creates a temporary charge on the particles present in the air causing them to collide, become heavier and sink to the ground. This way it accelerates the clearance of pollutants by six to seven times the natural speed of the dry deposition process i.e. the process whereby particles are removed from the atmosphere over time due to gravity.

Pulsed radio wave technology was earlier used in 90’s to mitigate certain pollutants in wastewater and sewage but was discontinued due to economic unviability. Devic Earth is utilising the same technique pf pulsed RF energy for mitigating air pollution.

Pulsed radio wave technology creates a weak electric field that affects particle pollutants of very small size up resulting in the formation of temporary dipoles. Clearance of pollutants occurs due to clustering and settling of these particles.

The company claims that this technology well-controls Particulate Matter, PM10, PM2.5, and PM1. In fact, PM1 and PM2.5 are reduced more than PM10 due to their smaller size but there is little effect on particles larger than 20microns in diameter.

Pure Skies is also has no adverse effect on health and is safe as units work in the ISM frequency band similar to the Wi-Fi spectrum (2.4-2.5 GHz) and power levels are maintained under standard regulations. At present, the device is being used in factories, offices, cities and at events. Pure Skies is available on subscription based business model very similar to DTH plans.

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Innovator's Vista

Warehouse Automation for Quick Commerce

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Innovator's Vista

Warehouse Automation for Quick Commerce

Automation, use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance, is becoming more and more prevalent in the industries such as manufacturing, robotics, and automotives. It offers many benefits like increase in productivity, reduction in risk related to labor.

Warehouse automation i.e. blending of stores and warehouses and the use of warehouse robotics, conveyors and automation technologies in e-commerce, is also seen as having a lot of potential. These systems can eliminate labor-intensive and time-consuming duties hence free workers up to focus on more value-added tasks, like quality control.

Quick commerce, a unique business model where the delivery of goods and services is done within 10-30 minutes of ordering, has expedited need for automation. The complexity of the Indian warehouses given their density, smaller size, and abundantly available cost-effective labor, present another challenge.

Goods to Person (G2P) warehouse automation holds the potential satisfy the needs of their demanding consumers. G2P robotics are Goods to Person robots such as Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), Automatic Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS) and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs).

Autonomous Mobile Robots – use on-board sensors and processors to autonomously move materials within a warehouse, without the need for wires, markers, or strips. AMRs can learn their environment and plan the route considering it, other AMRs, blocked pathways, and humans.

Automated Guided Vehicles – driverless, mobile vehicles guided by wires, magnetic strips, or sensors and restricted to following fixed routes. They can detect other robots, humans, or objects in front of them but must wait until the obstacle has cleared before they can continue.

Automated storage and retrieval systems: AS/RS, are made of a variation of computer-controlled systems that automatically place and retrieve loads from set storage locations in a facility with precision, accuracy and speed. Some of the systems that are used are: Vertical carousels, horizontal carousels, and Vertical Lift Modules (VLMs), Stacker Cranes, Pallet shuttles, Miniload systems, Cube based storage and Collaborative robots.

Automated Warehouses claim to allow deployment that is on average 10x faster with negligible installation capex and generate 3x higher ROI vs. competition. It also increases productivity by 3X, throughput by up to 50 percent, and space optimisation by up to 30 percent along with ensuring timely delivery of consumer orders.

A startup ecosystem is developing around this use case across the world. Warehouse Automation is one of the interesting new themes which are gaining popularity.

Categories
Innovator's Vista

Computer Vision for Quality Inspection

Categories
Innovator's Vista

Computer Vision for Quality Inspection

In manufacturing sector whether it is clothing and textiles, petroleum, chemicals and plastics, electronics, computers and transportation, food production, metal manufacturing etc, poor production quality has a significant impact on efficiency. It results in additional operational and financial costs in form of lost time, wasted resources, scraps and decreased efficiency. Therefore, maintaining quality standards is of utmost importance in the field of manufacturing.

Typically product is visually inspected for defects which is a highly manual process. It is time consuming, prone to errors and dependent on operator’s experience and requires consistency which is not always possible.  Rule-based visual inspection machines which are programmed, are not flexible, and cannot adapt to product changes and can only detect a handful of defects at a time.

By using computer vision in manufacturing quality inspection can be automated during the production process.  There are several advantages of using computer vision like reduced cognitive load for operators, no programming required, and it adapts to product changes. It also makes inspections faster, more accurate, and efficient. There are today several manufacturing firms that are shifting towards using deep learning and computer vision for quality control and inspection tasks. 

Computer Vision:

Computer vision seeks to replicate and automate tasks that the human visual system can do. It is an interdisciplinary scientific field that aims to give computers the ability to extract a high-level understanding of the visual world from digital images and videos. It uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning models to enable machines accurately identify, interpret, understand, classify and react to objects in form of visual data like digital images from cameras and videos.

More sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI)–based vision systems can enable more powerful visual inspection solutions. These solutions can handle complex applications with less engineering time compared to traditional machine vision solutions.

These systems are faster and simpler process that can carry out repetitive and monotonous tasks at a faster rate, which simplifies the work for humans. Computer vision systems better trained through all kinds of data generally commit zero mistakes resulting in faster delivery of high-quality products and services. With no room for faulty products and services, companies do not have to spend money on fixing their flawed processes.

By using a laser coupled with a 2D camera, object edges can be more easily located and “pseudo 3D” images can be produced. These 3D machine vision systems creates a full 3D profile of the object by stitching together the individual lines of image data that makes inspection of complex assemblies and sub-assemblies as well as individual components easier.

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Innovator's Vista

Digital Transformation of the physical infrastructure & assets through IoT Solution

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Innovator's Vista

Digital Transformation of the physical infrastructure & assets through IoT Solution

Digital transformation has become one of the most important factors for all businesses, from the small to the enterprise. It requires the incorporation of computer-based technologies into areas of a business like products, processes and strategies so as to change the way organisations engage with customers and as within.  It leads to reinvention of all facets of an organization, from supply chains, workflows, to employee skill sets.

Connectivity is a fundamental aspect of digital transformation, a concept of Connected Enterprises has emerged that involves facilitating a deeper level of collaboration among people and technological operations using internet of things. A connected enterprise is able to access more insightful data in real time, incorporating machine learning algorithms immediately to analyze data that leads to a more informed and better decision making process.

Connectivity gives real-time visibility into the inner workings of any facility thus reduction in work-related mishaps, overall increase in operational output, and cuts down on unnecessary expenses. It also takes care of issue like data siloes i.e. collection of data held by one group that is not easily or fully accessible by other groups in the same organization, and spots flaws within before it becomes problematic.

A startup, Resonant, is working on Digital Transformation of the physical infrastructure & assets through IoT Solution. The company has developed an in house solution named RUSH Stack (Resonant Universal Software & Hardware) for Edge Computing, Cloud Platform and On-Premises Solutions. It promises customized control across the enterprise especially for critical assets based on events, workflows through Cognitive Automation.

With manufacturing sector adopting IP based products and solutions to optimize production tools offered by the company, Cognitive Engagement (information flow) & Cognitive Automation (event-based controls) across different units in industries (or across different geographical locations) can help enterprises with real time information and control with the help of IoT and IP networks.

Similarly for Smart Buildings that use technology like Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, building management systems, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality and robotics, the company provides IoT-Based Monitoring & Control Solutions that claim to cover all aspects from Real Time Monitoring & Visualisation to Cognitive Automation, and thus reduces operational costs, maintenance costs, optimizes asset utilisation & life, and manages energy footprint.

For MSMEs the company offers MICS,a specially designed for a budget-friendly, modular deployment wherein large amount of data is collected from various sources, analysed & centralised for better data visualisation for critical decision making. And offers benefits like Increased Operational Efficiency, Reduced Maintenance Costs & Optimised Energy Footprint are achieved through various features of our solution.

For Solar OEM’s: Remote Monitoring Solution — the company offers solution with data logging hardware and backend platform for monitoring and control of solar assets. It claims to have more than 2500 units deployed PAN India and more than 300 units exported with customized requirements based on client preferences. This would help companies optimize plant performance by reducing unplanned downtime, reduce operations cost and improve revenues by better generation

Resonant has also got DIPP & DPIIT recognition for its products and solutions and has been honoured by MEITY for design, development and deployment of indigenous end to end loT Solutions (Hardware & Software Stacks complete made in India).