Era of 24/7 unattended output is here

BEIJING－From steel plates and mobile phones to household motors and rocket ignition device parts, more business lines in China are using artificial intelligence to power their production and have introduced "dark factories" with their 24-hour uninterrupted and unattended production capabilities.

Dark factories, also called smart factories, are entirely run by programmed robots with no need for lighting. They are expected to reduce labor costs, improve production efficiency and product quality, and carry out production under hazardous conditions to ensure worker safety.

To replace people with machines to do high-intensity, repetitive, tedious and even dangerous work is an essential step toward smart manufacturing in China's iron and steel industry. A dark factory of Baogang Group in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region uses robots to separate slag from molten steel. The slag discharge rate was reduced from 10 percent to 9 percent, and the one percentage point could save nearly $100,000 every year for the factory.

The Xi'an Aerospace Propulsion Institute is a research base for China's solid-fuel rocket engines. Production demand at the institute has been growing rapidly with the accelerated development of China's space industry in recent years. Without sufficient human and material resources, the institute achieved a 24-hour production mode for rocket ignition parts.

At night, automated equipment carries out the initial processing of parts at the dark factory. During the day, experienced workers give the finishing touches. The collaboration between machines and people doubles the production efficiency.

At a dark factory in Beijing, mechanical arms carefully pinch the two sides of a smartphone screen and fold it repeatedly like human hands. It requires more than 200 steps to make the foldable phone developed by Xiaomi Corp, most of which are carried out by intelligent equipment. According to the company, the dark factory has an annual production capacity of 1 million smartphones.

Megvii, a Chinese AI unicorn, built a dark factory model workshop for a household motor manufacturer in Zhejiang province.

Xu Qingcai, senior vice-president of Megvii, told reporters that it is typical for AI to empower traditional manufacturers to improve quality and efficiency.

Xu said a smart upgrade includes three aspects. First is the intelligence of a single device. At the dark factory in Zhejiang, Megvii deploys robots to lift cargo. With QR codes and navigation, the robots can accurately locate cargo, and the robots can be easily operated. AI algorithms can also improve the recognition rate of stained and wrinkled QR codes. Therefore, the factory does not need to change new QR codes frequently.

The second is the intelligence of the system. The dark factory in Zhejiang achieved the integration of multiple types of equipment and realized the interaction among the warehouse control system, the warehouse management system, enterprise resources planning and the production enforcement system.

The third is the intelligence at the facility. AI at a specific production site can perceive, think, execute and evolve. The brain of the household motor dark factory is an AIoT(AI and the internet of things) logistics management platform called Hetu developed by Megvii. It can learn and adapt the production site to conduct management and supervision of the equipment and production line as well as allocate various tasks to the machines.

At the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July, Xiao Yaqing, minister of industry and information technology, said that China's AI development had made remarkable progress in industrial applications with deepening integration of AI technologies and real economy businesses.

Xinhua