While Industry 4.0 is all about “Data Automation” and making Data available and retrievable easily, anywhere, anytime according to authorization …apart from convenience and working remotely what Qualitative advantage would it offer?.
- Anything that is capable of making a significant difference to Business must have already been monitored and acted upon with or without Automation so what tangible difference would I4.0 make?
- What are being sold as “Instant Key Industry 4.0 features” in Machine Tools are OEE, Predictive Maintenance and Energy Consumption Monitoring ….now the question to be asked is – Did Industry not monitor these attributes prior to I4.0 … if and when it was considered important enough?
If AI-ML does not sit on top of the acquired data, and through “Data Mining” and “Deep Learning” arrives at some “Intelligence” that was heretofore not possible …implementing Industry 4.0 would not make justifiable commercial sense.
Intelligence” changes the game and the way Business / Industry would work, so disruptively that it becomes a survival issue to pursue the same
Comparisons are not difficult to see … for example ….there was really NO relation between having a Cell Phone and having a Credit / Debit card and Net banking not so long back ….but technology has changed the way identity is ascertained even for financial transactions, and so today it has become impossible to survive without Smart Phone and linked e-Commerce
If Industry 4.0 is about total automation Industry 5.0 is all about having “human” touch, creativity and ingenuity into every premium Product / Service. This means our machines and manufacturing system would have to adapt to human vagaries and variabilities for collaborative working.
If a Robot has to work with human operative … the operative would not like to press a button or type some cryptic command for Robot …it is expected that Robot learns operatives commands through speech and body language.
It means going further, machines have to have speech recognition, gesture recognition, biometric identification capability and handwritten text recognition. When a co-worker spontaneously exclaims in vernacular the COBOT must understand his approval / disapproval like a human co-worker. Therefore, machines must recognize and learn about behaviour pattern of human around them and that is where AI-ML comes to fore.