Industrial Automation Platforms Closer to High-End Personal Computer Hardware
I have been working with some of the latest industrial automation
hardware platforms like PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers), sensors, and
robot controllers. Each new generation of hardware comes with increasingly
robust development environments, IDE (Integrated Development Environments),
processing power, and memory. It used to be that your automation system had
only kilobytes of memory to store a bunch of numbers and a few strings. Now, things
are much different.
Today, we are looking at an exciting convergence of high-end
PC computing architectures with industrial automation platforms. For example,
Advantech (www.advantech.com) and Nvidia (www.nvidia.com) are working together
to equip industrial computers with GPUs. Such collaboration means that
industrial systems are on the path to increase processing capabilities and
become a platform for executing complex AI algorithms at the production floor,
i.e., edge computing systems.
https://www.advantech.com/intelligent-systems/campaign/industrial-ai-iot-solution-nvidia
One of the main drivers is increased use of vision systems
that generate a large amount of data and require high-performance, high-density
computing with massively parallel chipsets known for graphical applications in
gaming and computer graphics.
It is an open question of what kind of operating systems
will run on devices like MIC-Jetson in the future. I would not be surprised if
a version of Linux or Android finds its way to edge computing devices and
becomes an industry standard. I have a feeling that industrial platforms
powering Industry 4.0 architectures will be system equipped with high-end CPUs
from AMD or Intel, GPUs from Nvidia, and solid-state hard-drives.
It makes me think whether the high-end (gaming) PC that sits under my desk would be a good fit…
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