The robotic arm runs at high speed, and on the production line with almost no one control, the wheels shuttle through all aspects of production with the track, and the whole process of smelting, casting, heat treatment, spinning, acceleration, painting, packaging, and warehousing runs automatically at full speed ......
Lizhong Group, located in Baoding, Hebei Province, is in full swing in the wheel production workshop, equipped with digital trains, and a factory building integrating intelligence, greening and informatization appears in front of us.
Founded in 1995, Lizhong Group focuses on aluminum alloy materials, auto parts industry, chemical materials industry, and its products are sold at home and abroad. In recent years, the party and the state have attached great importance to the construction of the industrial Internet, which also provides an excellent historical opportunity for Chinese manufacturing. Lizhong Group has also changed from passive automation in the past to meet customer needs, and now it has actively integrated digitalization into the informatization and strategic development of enterprises.
Relying on China Telecom's 5G customized network, Lizhong Group meets the needs of various application scenarios of factories, realizes the high-quality development goals of factory cost reduction, efficiency increase and quality improvement, and creates a benchmark demonstration of 5G fully connected factories in the industrial industry.
"5G+" improves production efficiency
For a manufacturing enterprise, product production often involves research and development, operation and management, manufacturing and the first chain and other links, and in these links, production and manufacturing are related to the quality of products, which can be said to be the foundation of an enterprise. Traditional manufacturing enterprises often face a common problem, that is, "uncontrollable production".
In the production process of aluminum alloy wheels, the wheels need different sorting operations after a series of production line processes, which often rely on manpower in the past, using human eye recognition + manual handling, and the work efficiency is relatively low. On the one hand, manpower is affected by the working environment, physiology and other factors, and repeated handling work at high temperatures for a long time is easy to fatigue, and it is easy to cause life and property safety problems; On the other hand, manually driven forklifts are limited by factors such as employees' working hours, and the scheduling is insufficient, making it difficult to improve production efficiency. Geng Shuai, director of information technology of Lizhong Group, said, "Now through the 'industrial vision system' and '5G+AI intelligent sorting system', the manpower bottleneck and accuracy problem in the traditional sorting method can be effectively solved. This is especially important for large-scale wheel manufacturing plants. ”
Based on the industrial AI vision system of "deep learning + 3D vision", the sorting robot detects, extracts, identifies and obtains the movement trajectory of the moving target in the image sequence through visual tracking, carries out data processing and analysis, and realizes the grabbing and palletizing of different wheel models through the action instruction set constructed by AI intelligent algorithm, and realizes fully automatic wheel hub up and down the line according to real-time production orders and beats.
The 5G+AI intelligent sorting system realizes the decoupling of processes and improves the production cycle. The sorting process is highly automated, and AI technology is used to achieve intelligent sorting, thereby improving the efficiency and accuracy of operations. The sampling rate of wheel hubs has increased from 1% to more than 5%, and the number of sorting operators has also been reduced from 6 to 2 to reduce labor costs.
The "chain" of smart brains brings out the innovation power of the park
Not only intelligent sorting, but the entire park operates in an invisible "nerve center" - a 5G fully connected smart industrial platform. China Telecom's 5G network connects terminal devices such as robotic arms, A**, AR glasses, AI cameras, and smart helmets, collects real-time data from the park, intelligently analyzes the system, and integrates all information sub-module data in real time on the visual digital kanban to realize the optimization and management of production processes, management decisions, resource allocation, and management. It is reported that the fully connected smart industrial platform built by China Telecom integrates seven subsystems, including the digital operation middle platform system, AI visual management system, intelligent safety supervision system, AR remote collaboration system, intelligent sorting system, intelligent warehousing system, and park management system, to open up various application scenarios of the industrial Internet and enhance the digital and intelligent capabilities of Lizhong Group.
Compared with the traditional manufacturing method, the production efficiency of tires in the "smart workshop" is greatly improved. "The 5G-enabled production line has high-speed real-time data transmission capabilities, which enables more real-time data interaction between devices and systems than traditional production lines. Shi Shaoning, Government and Enterprise Department of China Telecom Baoding Branch, said.
In terms of product quality assurance, relying on the mobile 5G network with large bandwidth, high speed and low latency, the data on the production line of the quality inspection process is uploaded to the platform in real time, and 5G + AI is empowered to analyze the process of manual quality inspection. When the quality inspection action of the worker is not standardized, the system can make an alarm and record it in real time. This provides a practical basis for the quality improvement of products and the quality retrospective of potential defective products, and further improves production efficiency.
In terms of park and logistics management, Geng Shuai said that in the past, there were blind spots in the park due to real-time monitoring of equipment, environment and personnel, and there were problems such as difficulty in controlling the entry and exit of personnel in high-risk and high-density areas, and it was difficult to ensure the safety of employees' posts and improve efficiency. "Now, relying on the 5G network, the equipment, environment and personnel data in the park can be monitored and transmitted in real time and at high speed, which improves the real-time grasp of the status data of the park. ”
Walking along the assembly line, Geng Shuai happily told reporters that with the advancement of digitalization, the workshop employees personally felt the convenience brought by digitalization to production. The production staff of the workshop have gone from having no perception of the information system to now the application scenario of the workshop informatization in charge of each workshop will take the initiative to ** the workshop informatization, forming an intelligent production effect. "We believe that the construction of smart factories is not to replace manual labor through AI, but to allow employees to get rid of simple mechanical operations, improve their own productivity, and turn to high-precision operations. ”
At present, China Telecom is promoting the construction of Lizhong Group's A** intelligent car, helping Lizhong storage area to realize the automatic matching of A** intelligent car needs, 24-hour unmanned operation, and improve the efficiency of factory warehousing and transportation.
The wheels are rolling towards intelligent manufacturing, not only in Lizhong, but also in the era of digital economy. Through digital transformation and upgrading, further improving production efficiency and quality level is no longer a "choice question" for enterprises, especially manufacturing enterprises, but a must answer. How to transform more and more traditional manufacturing factories into "smart factories"? In the future, China Telecom will continue to deepen the development of 5G customized network full-scenario applications, actively promote the construction of new infrastructure such as 5G industrial Internet and integrated innovative applications, and contribute more telecom wisdom and strength to promote the deep integration of data and reality and steadily promote new industrialization.
Photo by Lu Zhen and Lin Bijuan).