How does a smart factory use the high-precision positioning of UWB manufacturers to quickly realize intelligent transformation and upgrading? With the gradual increase of production equipment, the increasingly complex production process, the rapid rise in labor costs and the increasingly high requirements for system management, smart factories have become the future manufacturing industry inevitable trend of development.
The introduction of the Made in China strategy in 2025 shows that China has begun to gradually attach importance to the development of the intelligent industry, and strive to seize a new round of development opportunities to achieve industrial transformation. In the context of the accelerated development of new digital infrastructure such as 5G, industrial Internet, data centers, and artificial intelligence, the development of smart factories is accelerating. Many excellent manufacturing companies have carried out smart factory construction practices, accelerating the transformation and upgrading of themselves and the industry.
The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the economic impact of smart factories will reach $1.2 trillion to $3.7 trillion annually by 2025. Driven by current policies and investment trends in China, manufacturing, smart factories and the Industrial Internet of Things alone could generate $196 billion over the next 15 years.
1. What is the role of smart factories in smart factories
Simply put, a smart factory is based on the digital factory, using the Internet of Things technology and monitoring technology to strengthen information management and services, and at the same time integrating emerging technologies such as intelligent means and intelligent systems to build an efficient, energy-saving, green, environmentally friendly and comfortable human nature. chemical plant. High-precision location data is an important part of smart factory data flow, one of smart factory data indicators, and an important part of smart factory data flow. The accuracy, real-time and coverage integrity of spatial location data are important evaluation dimensions to provide front-end perceived quality for smart factories. The high-precision positioning management system based on indoor positioning technology, starting from the difficulties and pain points of the management of different types of manufacturing enterprises, with the help of indoor positioning technology, can achieve: 1. Accurately locate factory personnel, vehicles, materials, materials, etc. 2. Seamless tracking 3. Intelligent deployment and high coordination greatly improve the factory's lean production and refined management level. At present, automobile assembly, electronic manufacturing, home appliance manufacturing and other industries are actively introducing indoor positioning technology to achieve efficient and lean management of factories, which shows its market application prospects and development trends.
2. High-precision positioning of smart factory solutions
UWB (ULTra-WideBand) is a carrier-free communication technology that transmits and receives secondary non-sinusoidal narrow pulses to transmit data, and uses Tof (Time of Arrival) or TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) algorithms to calculate the location information of people or items. The positioning accuracy is up to 10cm. The real-time positioning system of the smart factory is based on ultra-wideband (ULTraWideBand) technology, which can track any object with an accuracy of 10-30cm indoors and outdoors, while tracking hundreds of objects in a single area. The system has the characteristics of high precision and stable fastening in industrial environment. The system architecture consists of perception layer, transport layer and platform layer.
- Perception layer: Positioning tags are bound to positioning objects (persons, vehicles, materials, equipment, etc.), and send wireless UWB signals within a specified time interval. The positioning base station receives the wireless UWB signal of the positioning tag, attaches the base station coordinates and time stamp, and transmits the attached data of the tag;
-Transport layer: The positioning base station uploads data to the positioning server through wired FE, wireless 5.8G Wi-Fi or 5G;
-Platform layer: The positioning engine LS1000 is responsible for solving the real-time position coordinates of the electronic label. The application platform realizes business functions such as real-time location display, track playback, electronic fence, working hour statistics, on-the-job management, and video linkage. UWB manufacturers' factory personnel positioning system based on UWB positioning technology deploys a limited number of UWB positioning base stations in the factory to wear UWB tags for employees, vehicles and materials to accurately locate the real-time location information of personnel, vehicles and items with an accuracy of 10 -30cm to control and monitor the factory trajectory in real time. The positioning system not only saves a lot of human labor, but also greatly improves work efficiency and helps traditional enterprises upgrade to smart factories. At the same time, the real-time positioning system serves various advanced intelligent systems. The 4W (Where, When, Who, What) positioning data from the positioning system is integrated and linked with the H (How to do, how to operate) business data from the advanced system ERP/MES/WMS, so as to maximize the use of production resources and improve on-site Efficiency and accuracy of management.
3. Application case
Here is a real project case, UWB manufacturers can let readers quickly understand the practical application of UWB technology in factories. E-ink screen factories often encounter the following problems in the process of intelligent transformation:
The factory area is wide, the production environment is noisy, and it is difficult to find people;
The material information adopts the printing label method, which is difficult to identify and easy to damage;
The number of trolleys is large, the parking is disorderly, the scheduling is difficult, and the vehicle utilization efficiency is low.
In response to the above problems, the customer deployed the UWB manufacturer UWB high-precision positioning system in its factory, and integrated the positioning label of the e-ink screen - supporting two-way data transmission. In addition to providing the positioning function, it also realizes the automatic refresh of the screen display. In actual projects, the UWB high-precision positioning system serves multiple application scenarios on the production site: ① Personnel intelligent management personnel wear ink screen card positioning tags, which can not only realize real-time positioning of personnel, quickly find personnel, but also customize electronic fences. Count the working hours of employees within the fence. The system can obtain the working time of employees in real time through the interface and associate it with the task order, so as to automatically count the labor cost of the order and the timeliness of task completion. Business Scenario - Personnel Intelligent Management ② Material box positioning and information visualization. As a carrier for material circulation in the workshop, the paperless material box is the key to realize paperless production. This project uses electronic labels of battery-powered material boxes of various sizes to realize the positioning and information visualization of the material boxes, effectively reducing the school team time on the production line, avoiding human errors caused by paper operations, and improving product quality. . ③ Workshop visualization management mostly relies on tabular data, and the degree of visualization is not high. In this project, related objects (employees, material boxes, AGVs, machines) are bound with electronic tags, and the upper system collects the electronic tag signals, calculates its position, and then feeds the information back to the intelligent manufacturing system and manufacturing unit. The whole process locates relevant objects, and uses the data of the positioning system to push and display in real time, which realizes the visual management of the whole process from accessories to assembly, and improves the efficiency and accuracy of on-site management. In addition, the real-time positioning system can simultaneously update material-related information through the API standard interface, optimize production resources, schedule production processes in real time, and optimize production resources. In addition, coupled with the characteristics of electronic paper and electronic ink screen, paperless operation is realized, which really helps enterprises to achieve a double harvest of economic and environmental benefits.
4. Build smart factories
Embracing new technologies in traditional manufacturing and actively embracing new technologies, the construction of smart factories by UWB manufacturers is an indispensable support for transformation and upgrading. Judging from the market development trends of the past few years, only those companies that know how to make the most of technology for magnificent transformation will have the opportunity to win, prosper, and even lead change in a rapidly changing market. In the face of this wave of transformation, we recommend that Chinese industrial manufacturing enterprises make full use of their existing advantages, use new technologies to improve their soft power, accelerate the pace of digital transformation and intelligent transformation, and gain an advantage in global competition.
