KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Consultancy : Research : Academic
The KTH Royal Institute of Technology, abbreviated KTH, is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH conducts research and education in engineering and technology and is Sweden’s largest technical university. Currently, KTH consists of five schools with four campuses in and around Stockholm.
Assembly Line
A maturity model for the autonomy of manufacturing systems
Modern manufacturing has to cope with dynamic and changing circumstances. Market fluctuations, the effects caused by unpredictable material shortages, highly variable product demand, and worker availability all require system robustness, flexibility, and resilience. To adapt to these new requirements, manufacturers should consider investigating, investing in, and implementing system autonomy. Autonomy is being adopted in multiple industrial contexts, but divergences arise when formalizing the concept of autonomous systems. To develop an implementation of autonomous manufacturing systems, it is essential to specify what autonomy means, how autonomous manufacturing systems are different from other autonomous systems, and how autonomous manufacturing systems are identified and achieved through the main features and enabling technologies. With a comprehensive literature review, this paper provides a definition of autonomy in the manufacturing context, infers the features of autonomy from different engineering domains, and presents a five-level model of autonomy — associated with maturity levels for the features — to ensure the complete identification and evaluation of autonomous manufacturing systems. The paper also presents the evaluation of a real autonomous system that serves as a use-case and a validation of the model.
Cloud-edge-device collaboration mechanisms of deep learning models for smart robots in mass personalization
Personalized products have gradually become the main business model and core competencies of many enterprises. Large differences in components and short delivery cycles of such products, however, require industrial robots in cloud manufacturing (CMfg) to be smarter, more responsive and more flexible. This means that the deep learning models (DLMs) for smart robots should have the performance of real-time response, optimization, adaptability, dynamism, and multimodal data fusion. To satisfy these typical demands, a cloud-edge-device collaboration framework of CMfg is first proposed to support smart collaborative decision-making for smart robots. Meanwhile, in this context, different deployment and update mechanisms of DLMs for smart robots are analyzed in detail, aiming to support rapid response and high-performance decision-making by considering the factors of data sources, data processing location, offline/online learning, data sharing and the life cycle of DLMs. In addition, related key technologies are presented to provide references for technical research directions in this field.
Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0—Inception, conception and perception
Industry 4.0, an initiative from Germany, has become a globally adopted term in the past decade. Many countries have introduced similar strategic initiatives, and a considerable research effort has been spent on developing and implementing some of the Industry 4.0 technologies. At the ten-year mark of the introduction of Industry 4.0, the European Commission announced Industry 5.0. Industry 4.0 is considered to be technology-driven, whereas Industry 5.0 is value-driven. The co-existence of two Industrial Revolutions invites questions and hence demands discussions and clarifications. We have elected to use five of these questions to structure our arguments and tried to be unbiased for the selection of the sources of information and for the discussions around the key issues. It is our intention that this article will spark and encourage continued debate and discussion around these topics.