The near future of Industry 4.0: hardware innovations

We are undoubtedly facing the 4th industrial revolution up with constantly changing opportunities in robotics, machine learning, and data storage technologies. These innovative approaches used in embedded software & hardware provide high efficiency and flexibility to the industrial environments. We would like to consider some Industry’s 4.0 manufacturing trends no matter what is the area of implementation: from agriculture and food to transportation and pharmacy.

When we discuss the direction of innovations we should build upon reaching viable data management technologies, facility flexibility, and energy efficiency. Due to ever-growing conscious around global pollution levels, manufacturers are more and more pondering not only about cutting all kinds of costs but making the whole manufacturing process more efficient and eco-friendly. That is a really decent trend contributing to cleaner production, carbon dioxide emission, energy poverty, and ecological footprint reduction, accessing the quality energy and sustainable development. So, these are the main evolutional “engine” of millions of industrial motors, robots, and other facilities.

Another hardware component of Industry 4.0 will be wireless charging, bringing uninterrupted autonomous functioning to industrial robots. They are represented by non-human operators needed wireless pads allowing considerable spatial freedom even in unsafe industrial environments like underwater or underground.

As for data storage, reaching energy efficiency and power density will be carried out by building new power supplies in racks and individual servers with intelligent software, cooling systems, and renewable energy.

Overcoming the challenges of new hardware design and fulfilling the great potential of Industry 4.0 is our priority in industrial automation and control. We urge for the reasonable industrial environment organization to contribute to sustainable development.