Automation is the prelude to intelligence. China's intelligent manufacturing needs globalization

"Made in China 2025" was released nearly a year ago, the concept level is colorful, from industry 4.0, industrial informatization to intelligent manufacturing, unmanned factories, and now more extended to unmanned cars, unmanned ships, unmanned medical equipment and other hot fields, it seems that the era of industrial intelligence, unmanned era is in sight.

Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei Technology, made an objective judgment about this. He believed that this is the era of artificial intelligence, and industrial automation should be emphasized first. After industrial automation, it is possible to enter information; Only after informatization, can intelligentize. Chinese industry is not yet fully automated, and many industries are not even semi-automated.

Therefore, it is necessary to understand the historical origin, technical origin and economic significance of relevant concepts before exploring industry 4.0 and industrial unmanned.

Automation is the prelude to intelligence
In the 1980s, the American auto industry was worried about being crushed by Japanese competitors. In Detroit, many envision a "lights-out production" to beat the competition. "Lights-out production" is a highly automated factory where the lights are off and the robots build the cars themselves. At the time, such thinking was unrealistic, and Japanese carmakers' competitive advantage lay not in automated production but in "lean production" techniques, which in most cases relied on human Labour.

Today, advances in automation have made "lights-out production" a reality. FANUC, the Japanese robot maker, has been able to put some of its production lines in an unattended environment and run autonomously for weeks without incident.

Aiming to become a global player, the German auto industry group has developed a new production strategy: modular horizontal torque. Volkswagen wants to use this new process to make all models on the same production line. The process will eventually allow VW's factories around the world to tailor their cars to whatever the local market needs.

Many years ago, Qian Xuesen said: "As long as the automatic control is good, even if the components are not good, the missile can hit the sky."
Nowadays, automation will largely imitate human intelligence. Robots have been applied in industrial production, ocean development and space exploration, and expert systems have achieved remarkable results in medical diagnosis, geological exploration and so on. Factory automation, office automation, home automation and agricultural automation will become the important content of the new technological revolution, and get rapid development.

On the whole, there is still a big gap between China's traditional industries and industrial powers in terms of technology and equipment, energy and raw material consumption, product quality and management level, especially the gap in technology and equipment (such as high-end CNC machine tools) has a widening trend. Large-scale equipment renewal, the country can not afford; To maintain the status quo of equipment, the consequences are unimaginable, only the application of automation technology to transform the traditional industry, in order to improve the quality of enterprises most effectively.