Beyond IoT: 2015 is the year of Industry 4.0

Rahman Jamal

The most important technology trends of 2015 will concern our continuing progress towards a fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0 (Industrie 4.0 as it is known in Germany).

There is a lot of discussion about the decisive role of the internet of things or cyber-physical systems, but ultimately these must be combined with business analytics, the internet of services and the social web, or social media.

Only when all of these areas work together seamlessly can we talk of a real fourth industrial revolution.

To meet the implementation challenges of such systems, we will need a platform-based approach like NI’s graphical system design, which is based on a reconfigurable, modular, software-centric architecture and eventually simplifies system development and test.

Our latest reconfigurable, software-designed CompactRIO controllers are an integral part of this platform-based approach. From a technology perspective, these controllers include an Intel Atom Processor as well as a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA.

The Atom processor allows the user to close the loop faster, tackle more tasks with the same controller, and process data with more precision, accuracy and speed with this dual-core processor. The Kintex-7 FPGA enables the user to process more channels and implement more complex filtering and control algorithms.

Meanwhile the NI System on Module is the single-board version of CompactRIO.

It combines the Xilinx Zynq All Programmable system on a chip (SoC), with supporting components such as memory on a small PCB. It features a complete middleware solution and has a ready-to-go Linux-based real-time operating system (RTOS) already integrated.

The NI SOM enables design teams to deploy reliable, complex embedded systems faster because it is based on the LabVIEW reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture, which has already been used in high-reliability applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles and cataract surgery machines.

Perhaps most exciting of all, both the CompactRIO controllers and the NI SOM are already contributing to the Internet of Things.

Airbus, for example, is using NI SOM for a project called Factory of the Future, an incremental long-term research and technology project that is critical to Airbus’ competitiveness in manufacturing processes.

The company tested the NI SOM as the foundation platform for smart tools in the Factory of the Future. Before developing on the NI SOM, they were able to create a prototype based on an NI CompactRIO controller (cRIO-9068) that allowed them to integrate IP from existing Airbus libraries and open-source algorithms to validate their concepts quickly.

The flexibility of using graphical and textual programming, as well as reusing third-party development ported on top of the Xilinx Zynq and the NI Linux Real-Time OS, offers the perfect level of abstraction for developing these tools. Airbus can now reuse the code that has been developed on the NI SOM as a deployed solution rather than having to restart the entire design process.

The use of the productivity gains of NI’s approach to system design, particularly with NI Linux Real-Time and the LabVIEW FPGA Module, the company estimates that its time to deliver with the NI SOM is a tenth of the time taken when using alternative approaches.

This ability to accelerate the progression of system development and test will be crucial to turning the most talked-about trends of 2015 from hype into reality.

Writer is Rahman Jamal, global technology and marketing director, National Instruments.

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