IOT AI and Industrial Computer Vision

Over the next decade, industrial IoT has the potential to unlock massive productivity across the entire supply chain. Accenture estimates that industrial IoT could add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030, helping to improve efficiency, lower costs, and augment the capabilities of human workers.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vast interconnected network of devices that can communicate and exchange information using the Internet. Industrial IoT (IIoT) is the various applications of IoT devices in the industrial and manufacturing spaces. For example, an HVAC manufacturer can install IoT functionality in the consumer devices it sells, so that it can remotely monitor performance inside people’s homes and even detect potential issues before the device breaks down.

By providing up-to-the-minute data about business processes and workflows, industrial IoT can enable greater agility and smarter decision-making.

With all that said, there’s one particular industrial IoT use case that can help businesses of all sizes and industries: visual inspection.

Fields such as manufacturing, drilling, and mining heavily depend on manual visual inspection in order to assess quality and detect problems. Thorough inspection is essential in order to maintain a high standard of quality for your products, protect your brand image, and meet the AQL (Acceptance Quality Limit) for your industry.

However, human workers aren’t always immediately available to perform visual inspections, and can also make critical errors by overlooking a particular issue or flaw. What’s more, visual inspections take time away from your human employees’ more cognitively demanding tasks.

Computer vision can therefore play a crucial role in industrial IoT by enabling automatic visual inspection for anomaly detection. With adequate training, AI-enabled computer vision systems can learn to distinguish between functional “good” products and a small minority of defective “bad” products.

There are many different ways, both real and speculative, that businesses can apply visual product inspection using computer vision. Rolls-Royce, for example, has proposed using tiny robotic “bugs,” just 1 centimeter in size and with cameras attached, that can inspect engine interiors without having to remove the entire engine from the aircraft.

While visual inspection is tremendously valuable for manufacturers, it’s not the only potential application of computer vision in industrial IoT. Other possible use cases include:

• Facial authentication: Computer vision AI systems can use facial authentication to help ensure that only authorized employees are allowed into restricted areas, such as the production floor.
• Product tracking: Products can be given codes or other handles that uniquely identify them. Computer vision AI systems can then read these IDs in order to track the movement of a single product through the supply chain.
• Robotic motion: Many businesses are directly employing robots or “cobots” (“collaborative robots” that interact with humans) in the manufacturing process. These robots can use computer vision to map out their motions (e.g. by following a marked line on the floor).
• Employee safety: Employees may need to wear protective gear such as goggles, jackets, and gloves while at work. Computer vision AI systems can identify non-compliant employees in order to boost compliance with all applicable safety regulations.
• Fire safety: Special infrared cameras can help detect fire hazards, such as overheating devices, and flag them for attention from a human supervisor.

With such a wide variety of applications, it’s no surprise that more and more companies are looking to bring computer vision into their industrial IoT processes. That’s why we offer the Chooch AI platform for industry, helping manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors incorporate visual AI into their business workflows.

Want to see the benefits of computer vision for industrial IoT for yourself? Check out our page of computer vision resources for businesses who are just starting out. When you’re ready, get in touch with our team for a live demo of the Chooch AI platform, and to start your free trial of the AI platform.