What is the Internet of Things?
The Internet of Things (IOT) is a phrase used to describe the application of connectivity to everyday devices. Imagine the embedded system which controls the temperature inside your refrigerator is now able to connect to your home network. The immediate question one might ask is, ‘but why?’
Greater connectivity of systems has the potential to improve the lives of people around the world. The big one for me is the potential increase in energy efficiency. Say you leave home and your house knows this, the heating temperature could be automatically be reduced, the lights turned off, and the alarm set. One could argue that people can do these things for themselves but, in reality, they don’t – or we rationalise that we aren’t really wasting that much energy. On a larger scale, even small savings in energy when applied across populations of billions can have a huge impact.
To go to an even larger scale, what about industry? Think of all the billions of processes carried out around the world to produce, store, and transport the goods we use throughout our lives. If small energy savings can be made at each stage of the processes, colossal overall gains would be achieved.
While I have focused on energy in this example, greater connectivity can provide much wider reaching benefits, many of which make our lives easier.
Is it really IOT which is doing these things?
Connectivity is simply allowing devices to transport data between them, most likely via the internet. The real power of IOT is the ability to monitor or control things where it was once inconvenient or costly to do so. It is often said;
“We cannot control that which we do not measure.”
In this context, IOT is really just providing information to allow us greater control.
IOT and AI?
People often talk of IOT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) together. True AI is software which has the capability to learn and improve. Much in the same way a child learns that their hand can be used to move things in the world around them, AI can learn through a process of trial and error.
The key to the learning process of AI is being able to measure the result of a given action. True control can only be attained by understanding the cause and affect relationship of a system. While taking a computer and producing basic AI might be a challenge, gathering the right data and getting it into the computer might be an even greater challenge.
Factory of the Future
The factory of the future concept is where IOT gets really interesting. As part of overall Industry 4.0, this is a concept mass production environment where no two things rolling off the production line are the same. While broadly speaking, the car factory will still make cars, each could roll off the automated production line with a different colour, features, even model might be possible. Truly customisable mass manufacture.
Such an increase in intelligence will require the generalisation of virtually all parts of the production process. This generalisation process will greatly increase the complexity of the manufacturing environment. For example, the robot arm which previously just repeated the same action over-and-over now has to execute any one of a number of actions depending upon what car is moving along the line.
As cell complexity rises it is likely that reliability will fall, unless we effectively monitor the systems within that cell. However, with our hypothetical factory being very large in size, running sensor cabling all over the place is likely to be costly and cause us further issues.
This is where IOT condition monitoring and control come to our rescue. If we can make our cell data available over a cheap and fast communication link we can ease the burden of developing our factory of the future.
DataBadger
At DataBadger we are developing sensor systems which couple data directly to the network. Our devices exist independently of a computer and sample data continuously, waiting to be contacted by a client over the network. Data is now passed easily over large distances to where it is needed. Systems can be remotely monitored and decisions made autonomously.
If you as struggling with a measurement problem, please get in touch.