Industry 4.0 - Automation & Applications

"The next industrial revolution is bringing about untold change in every industry, creating massive advantages and challenges to implement."

Industry 4.0 is the digital transformation of manufacturing/production and related industries and value creation processes. Industry 4.0 is used interchangeably with the fourth industrial revolution and represents a new stage in the organization and control of the industrial value chain. The implementation of industry 4.0 is giving birth to smart manufacturing practices and smart factories. Increasing productivity and revenue exponentially. In short, we can say the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0) is the ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices using modern smart technology (like robotics, CNC, 3D printing, etc.).

Smart manufacturing and smart factories bring with them optimizations and a growing ability to self-optimize production, leading to nearly zero downtime. Optimization will play a major role in keeping high-end equipment maintained efficiently by having the right resources in the right place at the right time. Being able to utilize your production capacity constantly and consistently is better than a major downtime or changeover. While IIOT (Industrial Internet of Things) and M2M (Machine to Machine communication) are in the lead, automation and related applications are playing a vital role in shaping the ecosystem of Industry 4.0.

This course is designed to cover the automation & application portion of Industry 4.0. This is very beneficial for students from the mechanical, manufacturing, & industrial engineering stream. Moreover, those professionals who are already a part of any manufacturing industry will get the additional knowledge of various developments in the field of technology that can revolutionize their existing practices. So this course is not only for aspiring engineers but also for working professionals. Some of the areas of automation & applications in industry 4.0 covered in the course are elaborated below:

Automation - Classification, Control System & Challenges

Robotics - Definition, Laws of robotics, Components of a robot, robot classification, DOF (degree of freedom), robot configurations, and some exceptional robots available in the industry.

Numerical Control - NC & CNC machines, Components of CNCs, Types of CNCs, Importance of higher axes machining, Programming format, CODING exercise (G-Code), Applications.

3D Printing - General Explanation, Procedure, Types of 3D Printing Processes, Materials & Applications.